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.

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