You Are Watching the Frontier Justice Channel

We at the Blasphemy Blog do not currently have a TV. If we did, we sure would not watch Fox News. How much of a joke is this channel? We know from personal experience that prospective jurors try to get out of jury duty by volunteering on their jury questionnaires that they watch it regularly. They do this because they know defense attorneys will immediately reject them as potential jurors. You're not going to get your client off with Fox News viewers on your jury, that's for sure.

How are these prospective jurors so confident that they'll be able to avoid jury duty just because they watch a certain channel? Consider the recent John Loftus incident. This Fox News analyst goes on TV and gives out the address of some guy in California he's heard is a terrorist. The address in question is subsequently vandalized, and its residents are harassed.

All well and good, no? It serves those terrorists right, and if they can't take a little vandalism of their personal property, they should stop being terrorists, those wimps.

Only one problem: the dude in question moved away years ago. Now it's just some regular Californian family living there, having to put up with this harassment.

And this alleged terrorist? Well, he did used to belong to an organization that has some links to terrorism, but he quit in 1997 because, apparently, it got too radical for him. I wonder what's on his mind these days. Hopefully, even though people are giving out what they think is his home address on national television and calling him a terrorist, he still feels the way he did in 1997.

The Orange County family whose house used to belong to this former sorta-terrorist sympathizer, meanwhile, has asked Fox News to apologize, but Fox hasn't done so yet. They probably will eventually, because an apology costs nothing. Then they'll do the same sort of thing again.

And those people who want to avoid jury duty? They're going to keep writing down that they watch Fox News. Because they know: if they can make the defense attorneys think they watch Fox News all day, the defense attorneys are going to assume they're the kind of people who will watch a news report that claims to reveal the location of a terrorist, and then go out and lay down some vigilante justice on that alleged terrorist's heiny.

That's not the sort of person you want making rational justice decisions. But apparently, it is the kind of person Fox News wants as an audience.