Whereas rival CNN has torn up its regular programming and dispatched an army of staffers to the ravaged region, Fox News appears to be going through the motions on the colossal story. Rather than breaking news, Fox feeds off partisan sparks. And it’s hard to get angry about a natural disaster because empathy does not lend itself to outrage — although that hasn’t stopped the high-priced talking heads at Fox from trying to turn the tsunami into a contentious issue.

If the Republican National Committee doesn’t have an angle on the story, then neither, apparently, does Fox News. And the last time we checked, there were no GOP talking points on natural disasters of biblical proportions. The best Fox News could do in terms of political spin was to bolster claims by the Department of Defense that the Bush administration was not slow to react to the crisis. Fox also routinely referred to the White House’s “initial” aid package as being worth $35 million, not the more accurate and paltry sum of $15 million. At one point during the Dec. 31 telecast, a picture of George Bush appeared in the upper left-hand corner of the Fox News screen with the words “Stop the Bush Bashing,” according to News Hounds, a Fox News watchdog site.

Two things have become obvious to news consumers in the aftermath of the tsunami. The first is that even when faced with covering a global humanitarian crisis, Fox News is incapable of turning off its robotic partisanship, not to mention its ever-present sense of victimization. Secondly, Fox News can barely call itself a serious news-gathering operation. Fox News is “not a news station,” argues filmmaker Robert Greenwald, whose 2004 film “Outfoxed” was critical of Rupert Murdoch’s news operation. “They put their money and resources into paying O’Reilly and [Sean] Hannity millions and millions, not into having reporters and real journalists around the world.”

Over the past few years that limited approach, along with Fox’s healthy dose of attitude and laserlike focus on domestic issues, has been enough to propel the network to the heights of niche cable news ratings. But when pressed to actually report on a story of worldwide significance, the cable news outlet looks distinctly second class. Flipping back and forth between CNN and Fox News this week for tsunami reports is like hopping between a Cadillac and a Pontiac.

As the Financial Times noted this week, “While CNN, the only U.S. news network with a strong global presence, was able to mobilize its correspondents in the region and fly in big-name reinforcements, Fox had to rely on untested freelancers, some of whom appeared to have never stood in front of a television camera before.”

On Wednesday afternoon during “Studio B,” Fox host Shepard Smith kicked off the latest relief updates and touted Fox News’ “team coverage” — which consisted of a single reporter in Phuket, Thailand, and a lone reporter in the network’s Washington bureau. Back on the night of Dec. 30, when CNN was going wall-to-wall with its tsunami coverage, Fox was airing, as the Los Angeles Times noted, a rerun of O’Reilly interviewing actress/fitness guru Suzanne Somers.

That’s why Variety concluded, “The most comprehensive coverage of the catastrophe last week came from CNN, which reaped the full benefits of its 24/7 news cycle, robust international bureaus and savvy field reporting by hotshot anchor Anderson Cooper.”

Cooper wasn’t alone. CNN has roughly 75 staffers fanned out across the region, including “NewsNight’s” Aaron Brown in Indonesia, and morning host Soledad O’Brien in Thailand. At broadcast networks, “CBS Evening News’” Dan Rather and “NBC Nightly News’” Brian Williams were both sent to the region to anchor broadcasts, as was ABC’s Diane Sawyer, and scores of other celebrity journalists.

But not Fox News. With its competitors dispatching their A-teams to South Asia, Fox’s big guns — O’Reilly, Brit Hume, Tony Snow, Chris Wallace, Greta Van Susteren — all remained safely ensconced inside East Coast studios. That’s because they’re not reporters but Beltway creatures of comfort, who rarely stray beyond the 202 and 212 area codes.

While Fox News seems oddly bored with the tsunami coverage, CNN does at times seem a bit too enthralled by the story. Its wall-to-wall coverage has been reminiscent of the media’s weeklong Ronald Reagan wake last summer. Just as it was impossible to distinguish between Day One and Day Five of CNN’s Reagan coverage (the endless Republican remembrances simply bled into one another), the same is true of its “Turning the Tide.” This Wednesday’s reporting on the massive relief effort wasn’t that much different from last Wednesday’s, and probably won’t be much different from next Wednesday’s.

While CNN deserves credit for its Herculean efforts, there’s a nagging feeling that if its ratings didn’t spike, viewers wouldn’t be inundated with reports from South Asia. But spike they did. According to Nielsen Media Research, CNN was up 75 percent overall with an 81 percent peak during prime time. Fox News, though, saw just an 18 percent increase in overall viewers and fell 6 percent during prime time.

It’s not surprising that CNN, with a vast upper hand in resources, particularly with CNN International, has cleaned Fox News’ clock on a story halfway around the world. What has been rather startling is how alternately mean-spirited and indifferent Fox News’ coverage has been. For instance, on Jan. 3 the “Fox News Sunday” round table of pundits spent as much time, if not more, making lighthearted predictions for sports and entertainment in 2005, as they did discussing the largest natural disaster in 40 years.

Mostly, though, the coverage has been nasty. Fox News host John Gibson bemoaned the fact that U.S. relief — getting water, food and shelter to millions of destitute people — might be part of an insurance scam to simply pay for the cost of rebuilding a resort community. “This is the travel industry, major big hotel companies,” he said last week. “How is it that United States taxpayers are going to be convinced you have to build hotels in Phuket?” He worried aloud that “Thailand, Indonesia, India, the countries that got hit [will] say, ‘We need dough and we need buckets of it to fix all this so Swedes can go on vacation in Phuket again.’”

O’Reilly blamed the “liberal press, which hates Bush” for criticizing his early response to the disaster, noting the initial $15 million pledge gave “secularists” an opening to go after Bush. (Secularists?) Belittling a Democratic strategist on his show, O’Reilly bellowed, “Nothing in your liberal world is going to be good enough. You guys — you’ve got to get off your contempt, your hatred.” Yet the only ones surrounding the tsunami coverage with hatred were the team at Fox News, which apparently feels naked without it.

O’Reilly also mocked Germany for only donating $27 million: “They’re America’s biggest critics, France, Germany. And they’re just pounding us day in and day out. And they — and when it comes down to crunch time, they don’t have anything to give.” Germany has since upped its pledge to nearly $700 million, dwarfing the U.S.’s aid package.

Meanwhile, Hannity decided that the wake of the killer tsunami was the perfect time to attack the United Nations: “The U.N. has proven themselves incapable, not trustworthy enough, to handle this or any other humanitarian effort.” Hannity dismissed the suggestion of his guest, Bill Orme of the U.N. Development Program, that, “This is a time to concentrate on the victims of this troubled disaster and what we can do together to help them out first.”

Of course, this being Fox News, it’s not surprising that partisan pundits bungled the facts. Hannity blasted U.N. emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland for having “the unmitigated gall and audacity to lecture North America and America and the world about being stingy.” Egeland did no such thing. And Fox-friendly pundit Ann Coulter accused former President Bill Clinton of attacking Bush in public for being too slow to respond to the disaster, which is patently false.

Leave it to Fox News to make the tsunami story about Clinton. And leave it to Fox to grow bored with the biggest natural disaster news story in nearly half a century.

And what, precisely, were Cameron’s bold remarks? When prodded on the subject of same-sex marriage on Morgan’s CNN show, the Christianity-themed movie star and father of six said that “I believe that marriage was defined by God a long time ago…. Do I support the idea of gay marriage? No, I don’t.” And when Morgan asked if he thought homosexuality was a sin, Cameron hedged a bit, refusing to use the word “sin” but declaring, “It’s unnatural, it’s detrimental and ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization.” Maybe “sin” would have been a nicer way of putting it.

Cameron’s remarks — along with his assertion that if one his children came out to him, “I would say … just because you feel one way doesn’t mean you need to act everything you feel” — were not greeted with universal applause. Over the weekend, GLAAD started a petition to “Tell Kirk Cameron it’s time to finally grow up,” calling him “out of step with a growing majority of Americans, particularly people of faith who believe that their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters should be loved and accepted based on their character and not condemned because of their sexual orientation.” Perez Hilton, speaking for much of the Twitterverse, referred to the interview as a “spew” of “homophobia and bigotry.” But as Hilton notes – and anyone familiar with Cameron’s hyper-evangelical ways would likely agree – “Did anyone really expect less from him?”

That’s where Morgan comes in. He knew exactly what a guy who’s currently on a “marriage tour” — and shilling a new documentary that says that “something is sick in the soul of our country” – would say. It was not going to sound like the lyrics to a Lady Gaga song. Accepting a person’s right to say things, even stupid things, isn’t the same as condoning them. Speaking to TMZ, Morgan described Cameron’s statements as what many would argue is “an antiquated view” and asserted, “I think that you can take the biblical thing too far.” On CNN, Morgan told Cameron directly that if one of his own children admitted that he was gay, “I would say, ‘That’s great, son, as long as you’re happy.’”

Unlike the even-more-loathsome Rush Limbaugh, Cameron wasn’t going out of his way to personally attack an individual, or to denigrate anybody in the name of a repulsive stab at humor. He was just answering a question. Morgan is correct in his assessment that Cameron’s response was an authentic one, and that there is a kind of bravery in that. It doesn’t make that kind of thinking good or right or decent, any more than it makes Morgan less of a hack for noting it. We may be demoralized by Cameron’s answer, and rightly decide that such rhetoric needs to be challenged. We can refuse to support his films. But in the fight against intolerance and hypocrisy, what we can’t do is ask a man a question point blank — and then be outraged when he answers it truthfully. All we can do is fervently hope that with the right amount of tolerant persuasiveness, one day he might be able to give a different one.

BLITZER’S BLOG: It’s going to get nasty!

By Wolf Blitzer, CNN
(CNN) – If you think it’s been a rough ride for the Republican candidates during this current campaign season, just wait. This will be seen as child’s play once the general election campaign begins.

I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again: the war of words between President Obama and his campaign supporters versus the eventual Republican nominee and his supporters will be fierce.

Even though there has already been a lot of talking and stuff happening during this political campaign, you won’t believe how much additional talking and arguing there will be as it continues. I have said in the past that Barack Obama and the person running against him will say things at and about each other, and I am saying it again. Things will be said.

If you think Wolf Blitzer’s blog post about the intensity of this campaign is finished, just wait. He quotes three lines from last night’s debate, then writes four more one-sentence paragraphs:

And that’s just for starters. Just wait for what’s coming.

By the way, the president and his supporters will not be shy in fighting back.

And like the Republicans, they will have hundreds of millions of dollars to finance attack ads.

Get ready for a brutal political season.

I am, Wolf! I am!

THIS JUST IN TO THE SITUATION ROOM: Every other political blogger has retired from political blogging to curate Pinterests about sandwiches instead, because Wolf Blitzer just made our jobs redundant.

The only remaining question is whether Wolf Blitzer is a better blogger than his Fox counterpoint in incisive online commentary, Greta Van Susteren. As long as CNN insists on “copy editing” Blitzer, we may never know for sure.

Grace, the woman who has made an entire cottage industry out of her indignation over Casey Anthony, who paints herself nightly as the avenging angel of poor dead Caylee, has never been one to trade in subtlety — or, for that matter, facts. CNN had to settle a wrongful death suit after the mother of a missing child killed herself after being browbeaten on her show. (The parties agreed that Grace “engaged in no intentional wrongdoing.”) She fearlessly championed the prosecution’s side in the Duke lacrosse team rape case, blithely referring to “the victim,” and went ballistic over the very notion that the accused might be innocent. (She then conveniently remained quiet on the subject after the case was dismissed.) This, folks, is a woman who has guilt-tripped abduction victim Elizabeth Smart for not playing along with her interview tactics. And even after a jury found Casey Anthony not guilty last summer, she has held on to the story like a dog with a bone, insisting that “I told the truth,” luxuriating in descriptions of “the backdrop of 2-year-old Caylee’s decomposing body just a few houses down from where Tot Mom put her pillow every night,” and excoriating Anthony for – rich irony alert –“generating interest in herself.”

Yet apparently there just aren’t enough kidnapped babies and alleged gang rapes out there to keep Grace satisfied. She’s turning her attention now instead to the mysterious death of a diva. Grace, who famously said last summer that she knew more than the “kooky jury” on the Anthony case, now seems to know more than the L.A. coroner’s office. Despite word that foul play is “not suspected at this time” in Saturday’s death of Whitney Houston, Grace isn’t so sure. On Monday she appeared on CNN to ponder, “Who, if anyone, gave [Houston] drugs following alcohol and drugs.” That itself isn’t a crazy question, though it is a bit of a reach – a suggestion that the story of a superstar dying alone and surrounded by prescription bottles just isn’t sexy enough. Not when surely there’s a villain on the loose for Nancy Grace to bring to justice. Cue dramatic theme music!

Medical accountability is to be considered whenever someone dies who may have had drugs administered to him or her. Just ask physician Conrad Murray, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Michael Jackson. But where Grace, in her totally Nancy Grace-like way, went totally bananas was when she asked, “Who let her slip or pushed her underneath that water? … Who let Whitney Houston go under that water?” Uhhhhhmm… Whitney Houston?

The sad desperation of news networks, and their flailing competitiveness in a glut of information overload, is rarely pretty to watch. But Grace isn’t just some blowhard, saying provocative things to get a rise out of the viewership. She’s a full-on loose cannon, a disseminator of disinformation and an ego gone rogue. That CNN and its sister network HLN continue to permit her to spew her wild speculations, to proudly flaunt her flat-out contempt for the facts as they are known, and to engage in character assassination long after a not guilty verdict has been rendered in a court of law, is blatant and arrogant recklessness. Unchecked, how long before Grace decides she knows who “pushed” Houston under the water? How long before she’s on another crusade, deciding who is a victim and who is a perpetrator? How long before a real criminal investigation or trial is tainted because of her nightly yammering?

After her jaw-dropping segment Monday, CNN anchor Don Lemon had to leap into fire-dousing mode, issuing a hasty reminder that “This is not CNN’s reporting. We don’t know that to be true.” Here’s a crazy idea – you shouldn’t be talking about things you don’t know to be true on a network with the word “news” right there in the middle of it. And CNN shouldn’t continue to provide a platform to a woman whose self-interest makes a mockery of journalistic credibility.

Politicians, you see, should be admired, because even though they are by and large rich, they still work very hard, every couple years. So says Wolf Blitzer in his essay on politicians, “I admire politicians, by Wolf Blitzer.”

Most of them already have lots of money. They could easily coast at this point in their lives and sit back and relax.

Instead, they are working hard on the campaign trail.

Sometimes people have to do stuff they don’t want to do, unless they have a lot of money. Usually people with a lot of money like to play golf, because playing golf is more fun than going to work. If a person with a lot of money goes to work, he must like work a lot. Even though sometimes work is hard:

I’ve seen them in action, and it’s tough. They get up early in the morning and go to sleep late at night. They have to deliver the same stump speech over and over and over again, and then answer an endless amount of often annoying questions at town hall meetings, at diners and from reporters such as me.

Next time you think about criticizing a politician, step back and think about how early he woke up this morning, and how many times he had to give a boring speech. He might have even had to deal with Wolf Blitzer! Now don’t you feel guilty?

Blitzer hits his main theme — it’s admirable that politicians actually get out of bed and do things even though they are rich — once more and names the politicians he is specifically saluting:

Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Ron Paul and Rick Perry could have taken the easy path and relaxed and enjoyed life. Instead of playing golf and hanging out with their children and grandchildren, they are working hard trying to get the Republican presidential nomination. In the process, they are bitterly attacked – often for good reason.

In their pursuit of more power these already powerful men have allowed themselves to be scrutinized and even occasionally criticized, which is quite a sacrifice.

This salute to politicians even ends in the most perfectly CNN-y way possible, by presenting two vague and conflicting viewpoints and refusing to adjudicate between them:

Why do they do it?

I know what they say. They say they are interested in public service and want to help the American people. They say they believe in what they are trying to achieve.

The cynics say they have huge egos and are simply seeking power and glory.

That is certainly true of some politicians.

But having covered many of them over the years, I also know some are trying to do the right thing, and I salute them.

“Some say politicians are power-hungry narcissists, others say they are noble public servants. Both sides could be part right, some of the time, most likely.”

The sole disappointing aspect of Blitzer’s salute is that it includes no musical tribute.

[Via Glenn Greenwald]

In a new video — ostensibly recorded in October but which did not emerge until Thursday — a now blond, bobbed and bespectacled Anthony narrates a four-minute “diary” entry about her new life. She says she’s “extremely excited” about her future and new computer – being able to Skype, take pictures, and “finally have something that I can finally call mine.” What she doesn’t mention? The child she used to call her own.

Though Anthony, still on probation in Florida, makes no mention of her exact location, her parents said Thursday they were “concerned” the video might endanger her. It has definitely stirred up the usual outrage from the most predictable mouthpieces. In other words, CNN is stoked. For Nancy Grace, the video has been like a late Christmas present, an opportunity to froth like she hasn’t frothed about “two-year old Caylee’s decomposing body” since last summer. Trotting out her favorite nickname for Anthony, Grace opined that “I think this is very simply Tot Mom Casey Anthony and her lawyers, possibly, injecting themselves back in the national media because nobody’s touching her offer for a paid-for interview with a 10-foot pole.” She added that: “It’s all about Tot Mom… generating interest in herself.” Dr. Drew Pinsky, meanwhile, eagerly pointed out her “narcissism and … issues of judgment.”

Out in the wider world, meanwhile, the public reaction has been mostly an excuse for another outpouring of revulsion against the lady one MSNBC commenter called “the most hated person in the U.S.A.” Also unsurprising — and straight-up gross — is that Anthony has her fair share of rabid admirers. On the shudderingly self-proclaimed “#1 Casey Anthony Fan site,” reaction toward the “smokin’ hottie” and her video has been considerably warmer. Or, as one commenter put it, “I would love to rock your world sometime.”

But why did the video emerge now, and who is Anthony really communicating with? Is this a public statement or truly a private “diary”? Anthony’s lawyers told a Florida Fox affiliate that “Casey has maintained some notes on her thoughts for personal use, especially for counseling. She did not release this video to YouTube and does not know how they got it. It could not have been legally obtained and was not authorized.” And John Riley, the man who runs a “Boycott Casey Anthony” Facebook group and first posted the clip, told Nancy Grace Thursday that he found the clip on a few pay-per-view sites and “kept looking and looking and looking” until he found it for free. He says he posted it “so there would be no money made off it.” Try to get your head around the idea of someone clawing doggedly around the Internet for four minutes of what Anthony  promises “will be as tedious as my audio recordings have been” and you begin to appreciate the apparently endless fascination this woman still holds.

Anthony’s “tedious” four minutes don’t reveal much about the inner workings of someone found not guilty of killing her daughter. They do seem in line with thoughts of someone recently released from jail – the simple relief of having one’s own possessions, the pleasure of having a dog. And she might well be circumspect about talking about her child and her trial, even on a supposedly private “video log,” if her lawyers have coached her to be. So is her video a case study in narcissism, a private moment from a “smokin’ hottie,” or just personal thoughts before a counseling session? The answer is simple. It’s whatever you already thought. Though Casey Anthony says, “Things can only get better,” minds aren’t changed as easily as hair color. “It’s surreal how things have changed since July,” she declares at one point in the clip. Then she adds, as if speaking for both herself and everyone watching, “and how many things haven’t.”