“That was my first brush with a not-so-well-kept dirty little secret of the news industry: Fox had hundreds of slick, pre-produced four-minute obituary videos filed away and read to go at a moment's notice for almost every prominent celebrity and politician over the age of sixty. Every once in a while if a shift was particularly slow, I'd give myself a morbid thrill pulling the obit compilation from the tape library and watching a few of the pieces. Fox was hardly alone in this practice--my understanding is that all the networks and cable channels have similar compilations. But Fox stood out with the unique spin it gave certain figures. My favorite was Bill Clinton's, whose obit is hilariously Foxified, spending almost half the running time on Lewinsky and other bimbo eruptions. Meanwhile, the Dick Cheney obit makes him out to be a heroic freedom fighter, practically Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rolled into one.”

-- Joe Muto, “An Atheist in the Foxhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media,” pg. 51

Tags: FOX-News, Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, Obituaries