So a live, rambling, out-of-left-field admission of adultery by a sitting US Governor is big news, and it is just the sort of thing our 24-hour news networks should love. Except Fox, which cut the feed.

When the Mark Sanford press conference began, we turned on Fox, hoping against the odds that maybe Shep Smith had started an hour early today. Instead we got... commercials? They did eventually cut to the conference, already in progress, but right in the middle—right before the wife-cheating bit was finally, explicitly admitted to!—the screen went blank for a moment, and Martha MacCallum looked baffled.

They did cut back to Sanford, after a minute. (Not shown: when, post-conference, a sad-looking MacCallum praised Sanford because he "didn't want to take TARP money for his state." Maybe because South Carolina isn't a bank?)


It was a fine moment for unprofessionalism at all the networks, though! At CNN, Kyra Phillips was "pretty biased in all of this," and really had nothing else to say to Candy Crowley, who just waited for some sort of question she could answer.


And on MSNBC, meanwhile, a South Carolina politician attempted to give an interview outside the statehouse, but a guy just kept screaming, the whole time. This is maybe the funniest clip? The man is just shouting HELP! HELP! SOMEBODY HELP! And the interviewee is all just ignore him, please.