I woke yesterday, fried my eggs, downed my requisite eight cups of Yuban, and, as I so often do, flipped the telly to my favorite station, Fox News.

I'm so glad I did.

In the course of three minutes, I learned that Bill Clinton caused 9/11 by not killing Osama bin Laden in 2000 when he had the chance. I found out that the recently-released study by the National Intelligence Estimate stating that our global war on terror has actually increased the number of the world's terrorists was, indeed, probably just left-wing rhetoric. And, for kicks, they threw in a couple clips of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez crazying it up at the U.N. last Thursday, just to make sure I didn't forget that he referred to our president as the "devil."

They just don't tell you this stuff anywhere else!

I watch Fox News for the same reason I pause on Comedy Central for a few seconds each time the Dane Cook standup special is on; I am simply galled by the fact that something this moronic can resonate with so many people. But whether you're hog-tied by Fox News or not, you don't need to hear another liberal like myself informing you of its not-so-secret conservative agenda.

What you do need, though, is to realize what TV news is feeding you - 10-second clumps of whiplash-inducing headline, regurgitated by focus-group-selected talking heads and cultivated personalities with accompanying flashy graphics and booming tympanis, designed to shock and awe you just enough to sit tight through those Downy commercials, waiting for the punch line. Fox News may be notoriously sensationalistic, but it's not as if CNN's nonstop punditry or Katie Couric's lemon-scented nightly news-based smile-fests are that much better. The TV news business is just that -- a business -- and, particularly since the advent of the 24-hour news day in the wake of 9/11, business is booming.

If it shocks, it sells, and if there's room for extra shock in Scarborough Country tonight, you better believe he's gonna pack it in.

But if you take away all the stuff designed to boil the blood and enchant the eye, does what's left for TV media even begin to approximate the truth?

Perhaps Bill Clinton missed the boat on killing Osama bin Laden when he had the chance, but I've certainly heard more detailed strategic explanations out of his mouth as to why he couldn't than I've heard from those questionably-credentialed, heavily-compensated, makeup-caked "experts" who hop on The Beltway Boys to fault him. Maybe we really are winning this ever-expanding war on terror I keep hearing so much about, but I'm more willing to take stock in the conclusions of the National Intelligence Estimate, a document that represents a consensus view from 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, than I am in anybody who'd discredit it by calling it, as Fox did over and over again yesterday, "liberal spin." And, even though I don't hold with Hugo Chavez calling President Bush the devil (he's really more of a Jethro Clampett), I do hold with him railing against "the hegemonic pretensions of the American empire" and the current administration's "imperial hypocrisy from the need they have to control everything," as he did in the same speech.

I bet you'd heard the devil line half a dozen times since Thursday. But the other stuff he said, the important stuff, the meat of his speech? That's just not sexy enough for a sound byte.

Unless you're taking the time to go a bit further than the wall of TVs in Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room, you've got every reason to believe that Clinton could've stopped 9/11. Or that nobody in the world could possibly be miffed by us rolling over Baghdad. Or even that Hugo Chavez is Señor Crazypants.

Maybe he is, and maybe he isn't. But if you're considering making up your mind on it (or any other issue), I encourage you to find a better merchant of the last word than, you know, Anderson Cooper.