California Bloggin' v5.0 :: Desiderium

News?

I got home last night just as Countdown was going to its first commerical break. Keith Olbermann said when they returned, they would run a story on the New Orleans police department's trials and tribulations. During the break, I switched to CNN to see what Paula Zahn's show was doing. They were doing a report on FEMA's response to the Katrina catastrophe, then switched to a report on how the contaminated flood water could cause diseases. Against my better judgement, I switched to the Fox Pseudo News Channel to see what O'Reilly was jabbering on about. Normally, O'Reilly nauseates me. Last night was worse. What was his big news story? Geraldo Rivera. Yes, while there's death, devastation and disease all along the Gulf Coast, the big story on The Factor was that a columnist for the New York Times alleged that Geraldo pushed rescue workers out of the way so his camera crew could get shots of him resuing an old woman. At one point, O'Reilly said something like "There's enough you can say about us without lying."

Apparently Keith Olbermann believes that because Geraldo was "Countdown's" "Worst Person in the World" last night. Why? Because of this from Salon.com:

Geraldo Rivera arrives in a Fox News truck. An elderly woman with blond hair grips his elbow. She's wearing thick dark glasses and a pink shirt. He carries her small white dog in his arms. He's wearing thigh-high waders unzipped to below his knees. We shake hands. "Her relative called one of our stations," Geraldo tells me, explaining how that call went to another station, and then another, and finally to him.

The woman had been stranded in her home for six days. Geraldo picked up the woman and her dog and brought them here. The woman looks frail on his arm, though not as bad perhaps as a lady collapsed on a chair nearby, unable to move. Or a woman in a wheelchair being lifted from the truck, carrying her prosthetic leg on her lap.

"That's the second time he brought her here," one of the doctors tells me, nodding toward Geraldo.

"What?"

"They did two takes. Geraldo made that poor woman walk from the Fox News van to the heliport twice. Both times carrying her dog."

"Are you serious?" I ask. He says he is.

And that, dear readers, is just one of the reasons I hate the Fox Pseudo News Channel. Although O'Reilly says his show is the "No Spin Zone," I say "No one spins it like O'Reilly."