A small commotion was created two days ago by a would be comedian on the television show Red Eye on the Fox News Network, what its host describes as a satirical news programme. He and his guests mocked the Canadian military over a report that the Canadian Forces would need an operational break of one year after finishing their Afghanistan mission to refit and reinforce.
As Canadian satirist Rick Mercer pointed out, comments made on a low-budget, third-rate imitation of The Daily Show, shown on the worst news network in the United States in the dead of night are not worth the outrage that it generated from Canadians. Dead soldiers are not comedic material and the host of the show, Greg Gutfeld, merely humiliated himself with an appalling display of ignorance about Canada in general and its contribution to the Afghan operation. When the Canadian government demanded an apology, Gutfield lacked the backbone to make it himself and delegated the job to the Fox News PR department. The most likely result of this fracas is that the cancellation notice for Red Eye that has no doubt been sitting on the desk of the VP of Programming at Fox News has moved to the top of his IN box.
Sadly, Fox News is now the most popular news network in the United States and the ignorance and laughable arrogance displayed by Mr. Gutfield probably played well in middle America. To put the credibility of Fox News as an information source in perspective, in 1997 the company fired two of the employees in its Florida affiliate for refusing to include in a news report information they knew to be false. The employees sued the company successfully, but Fox News appealed the decision and won on the grounds that FCC rules against the deliberate falsification of information in news programming did not constitute an actual law. Fox sued for the right to lie to the public and won.
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