FOX News is good at two things: blatantly misleading its viewers and running moral outrage-laced diatribes about Our Nation's Youth interspersed with footage of hot, inebriated beach babes.
Here we deal with an instance of the latter in which one of the network's "personalities" tries to make Tampanians look stupid.
Monday night, the network aired O'Reilly Factor contributor Jesse Watters' man-on-the-street interviews of drunk people at Gasparilla here in Tampa two weekends ago. (We link to TBO's story about it here so you don't have to click on FOX's site. Because we care.)
Were there a whole lot of dumb responses to Watters' questions about current events?
Sure.
One guy thought Gitmo was an exclusive dance club. Another thought Watters was asking about "bird dog" during a question about Bowe Bergdahl, the former Taliban captive who had gone AWOL. A female reveler another though ISIS means "being alone." And of course, most of the women were scantily clad and a couple event showed Watters their bums, which is probably why O'Reilly Factor producers let him do the piece in the first place.
Was it a dooming indictment of our city/region/state/generation?
Hell no.
Because if you go to a festival known for mindless debauchery and asking visibly intoxicated attendees questions about world affairs (on which maybe 10 percent of the general population can articulate while sober), you're gonna get some depressingly dumb answers. Try doing the same thing at a university campus, as others have been done before, and call us, dude.
One bright spot: the only respondent who had a coherent answer was a young woman with a green mohawk (which is what we'd expect, but people who watch FOX News think only boneheads would dye their hair anything other than blonde).
Watters asked her whether the US should close Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.
"Are we creating more terrorists by doing what our attorney general finds as torture? Yes," she said.
The piece was interspersed with short clips from films we've all seen at least 20 times, such as Wayne's World and Office Space, to accentuate the particularly dumb responses.
The thing is, if FOX News was so concerned about people being uninformed about world events, maybe they should tackle the problem by starting with their own viewers.
This article appears in Feb 5-11, 2015.