This has been a busy news week, and as one sometimes does, I turned to the Fox News website to see how they were handling it. My usual fare is the New York Times, the Atlantic, BBC, NPR, CNN, and so forth. They all say pretty much the same thing. But what do Fox viewers know about all this?

            Actually, nothing, as it turns out.

Take today for instance. The headlines on all of the major news outlets were about the bombshell report that the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, had warned President Trump in May that his name was often mentioned in the Epstein files. Since the entire corpus of the files are held in her office, there is no doubt that she let him know what it said about him, his relationship to Jeffrey Epstein, and in what activities he might have been involved. She has the power to release those files to the public—just as she did days ago with the Martin Luther King, Jr. files. But she hasn’t. And she knew that Trump was mentioned.

            The leak from the Attorney General’s office was the big news, but the major news outlets also reported on the court’s rejection of Trump’s request for the relatively unimportant Grand Jury files on Epstein to be released. And there were items on the near starvation situation in Gaza and Columbia University’s $200 million dollar settlement (more like a bribe than a settlement) to get its millions of dollars of research money released. I expected that Fox would put an interesting spin on all of this, but what I found surprised me even more.

            Nothing.

            There was nothing on the Epstein case, nothing on the court’s rejection of Trump’s request, nothing on Gaza or the Columbia University settlement. There was only the sound of crickets.

            But there were news items that grabbed the Fox News headlines. Surely in the NY Times you read about the amazing subpoenas that have been recommended to be sent to both Hilary and Bill Clinton by a House committee investigating the Epstein matter, didn’t you? No? Hmm, neither did I.

            The biggest Fox News headline—a banner across the page in vibrant red—stated that “Tulsi Gabbard Gives Major Update on DOJ’s Role in Investigating Trump-Russia Collusion ‘Hoax.’” Amazing news, I suppose. Though I didn’t see a single word about that in any other news outlet, and I looked at quite a few.

            Then there were many other front page items that I had never heard of. A comedian slammed “terrorist supporter” NYC mayoral candidate (we know who that was), and an attack by Joy Behar on the television show “The View” prompted Trump to tweet a warning about the show’s future.  And there were many items that you find at the bottom of newspaper pages, usually as filler for empty columns – a missing co-ed in Wisconsin, a Black actor on Broadway making a racist remark.

            This follows a pattern that I have noticed in my other occasional checkups on the Fox News page. There is just very little, well, news. It is no surprise that a Pew research poll showed that Fox News viewers were less well informed about the world than people who did not watch or read any news at all. You can actually know more about what’s going on the world by listening to people talk in the elevator than by watching Fox News and thinking you have information.

            The worst part about it is that the TV channel presents itself as a news source. It has all the cyber technology and glossy graphics to give the illusion that it is presenting news. It’s not.

            Many of us who view the horrors of what this administration has committed during its short tenure would like to think that once everyone knows about it, they will wise up and seek for change. That might be true, if those millions of viewers who rely solely on Fox News for their information actually find out about it. Maybe they will hear something in the elevator?