There's News, American News, and Then There's Fox News

America: where watching sport on television began and was perfected. In those soulless bars on the outskirts of bland towns, men would sit in a line at the bar drinking beer and watching sport; any sport; all sport. Drinking and watching and watching and drinking - and talking stupid. More often than not the volume is muted and a ticker service runs across the bottom of the screen conveying the commentary in text. There is no need even to listen. All you need do is stare. At the baseball, at the basketball, at the golf, at the Nascar, at different baseball, different basketball... If John Cheever or Richard Yates or James Salter were writing today their stories would be filled with lost men spending lost evenings staring at meaningless sport in anonymous bars.

The perfect venue for sports watching and drinking is, of course, the airport, because the alcoholic and sportaholic alike can go about their business at any time of day or night without attracting any scorn. Order a Michelob at six in the morning and no one looks at you askew, for no one knows that you have no flight to catch. You can sit and drink and prattle on about this pitcher and that point man and this venue and that franchise and the person on the neighboring stool will listen politely because he knows that in 30 minutes' time he will be boarding his flight to Wyoming. Everyone's happy.

Except this week. Along with the remorseless diet of sport, there has been sport as a news story. The Olympic torch has crossed the Atlantic and Fox News have been running with the story.

Before I left for Augusta for the golf, I watched BBC News 24 cover the story as entertainment, as it should be. It was presented, like the May Day confrontations of recent years, as an intriguing match-up between police and demonstrators. If you will, a game of cat and mouse, with batons, and without analysis from Alan Hansen.

Sky News, meanwhile and very oddly, decided to dispense with the live action for an interview with David Cameron [leader of the Conservative Party] who had nothing of interest to say about the torch, or anything else for that matter. Silly.

But over here on Fox, surprise, surprise, the travails of the torch provided an excuse for some aggressively racist coverage. In a country where 'you all' is an inclusive term when they start saying 'they' and 'them' and 'those', as they did of the Chinese, you know they are putting the boot in.

The presenters criticized the organizers in San Francisco for having 'flung a baton switch on the folks' and the torch, itself, for not only having 'left without saying goodbye' but also having 'got more protection than John McCain'. They concluded by describing the decision to give the Games to China as being 'a bunch of bull'.

In among the ranting, one group was overlooked. During unilluminating 'to boycott or not to boycott' debates, there was much talk of the sacrifices made by athletes who may or may not be headed for Beijing. Yet no one gave due credit to the Chinese security boys in their fetching tracksuits. They, too, have trained for a long time. They, too, wanted to make their country proud. They, too wanted to go the distance. And, instead, the route was changed and the opportunity for them to prove themselves at the highest level denied.