I turn on Fox News to see what's happening and the only news in the world is that a hurricane is heading for New Orleans. Now, NO is one of my favorite cities - what with the Hotel Moteleone (killer hotel bar), Clover Grill, the Napolean House, Cafe du Monde, (for tourist watching), and more kick-butt restaurants and bars than you can visit, how can you go wrong?

However, Fox News (and I can only assume the other channels, although I don't watch them) reports that NO is "under seige" and runs banner headlines such as "walls and roofs of well-built houses may collapse" and "people and pets exposed to winds may die" and the such. This is not news!! This is hypothetical sky-is-falling rambling which is neither news worthy nor entertaining (at least to me).

The marginal cost to Fox for being "wrong" about their dire predictions is essentially zero. The marginal benefit for having hyped the hurricane for the entire weekend if the hurricane event is catastrophic must be pretty high - I suppose Fox could then claim in the future that they "were there."

The anchors have interviewed the requisite weatherman who will ride out the storm, but have also interviewed "experts" on electric power line repairs, cholera and West Nile virus (evidently there is potential for an epidemic), they have discussed the long lines to get into the Superdome (which haven't been clearly explained), the possibility that the entire city will be under twenty feet of water (allusions to the "Lost City of Atlantis" have been made more than once), and that too many people think the storm might miss NO and that is a shame.

Fox News now anticipates what will happen in the future, and reports such anticipations as news, even while it reports in real time what is happening and then reports on what happened in the past. News used to be past and present tense - primarily past tense. Now, news seems to be past, present, and future tense. The trend of pulling news from the future to the present is wearing on me, which is why I don't often watch cable news.