FNC Viewers

I think this offers a pretty good insight into the depth and interest level of the typical Fox News Channel viewer:

Van Susteren’s “On the Record” has relentlessly followed the mysterious disappearance of 18-year-old Natalee Holloway of Alabama while on a graduation trip to Aruba in May.
Critics find it an obsession bordering on the bizarre, twisting traditional notions of news judgment and becoming Exhibit A in the media’s fascination with missing people — as long as they happen to be young, white, female and pretty.
. . .
She averaged nearly 2.2 million viewers a night in July, up 58 percent from the same period a year ago, according to Nielsen Media Research. CNN’s Aaron Brown used to put up a tough fight in the time slot; now Van Susteren routinely triples his audience. She narrowly missed 3 million on July 26, her biggest audience this year.
. . .
With war and terrorism in the news, critics wonder how one missing person case can so dominate a news program. Even on the night President Bush nominated John Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court, ”On the Record” spent far more time on Holloway.
Her name came up 178 times during a computer search of “On the Record” transcripts from the past two months, only seven times for the same period on Keith Olbermann’s “Countdown” on MSNBC. The count was 434 times for Fox’s three prime-time news shows; 50 for CNN’s.

Four hundred thirty-four times? And this count is at least a week old. From what I’ve seen, there hasn’t even been any hard news to report on this case–just a bunch of suspicion and someone finding a missing belt [not even the victim’s]. What can people possibly find interesting that’s worth listening to the bobble heads speculate for hours about this story?
Leave it to Fox News to make a hero out of mother who’s lost a child in Aruba, but a villain out of one who’s lost hers in Iraq.