Welcome to SMU, Fox News!

For some reason, you’ve decided to grace us with your presence as a part of your “Thank You America” tour celebrating your tenth anniversary.

Ten years of Fox News.

We won’t lie – that’s pretty impressive, but in a very scary kind of way.

More like, we can’t believe people are still eating this up after a decade.

The cable news universe with Fox News has turned from a 24-hour news cycle into a 24-hour screaming cycle. And yes, we point the finger at you.

For all of the “Fair and Balanced” and “We Report, You Decide” blather, it’s quite obvious your network has made TV far worse than you found it.

Any network that features a primetime line-up of fake debate and lunatic extremists from both sides is not contributing to the public good. It’s contributing to the further deterioration in public discourse.

A new news network could have been a good chance for quality story telling and a challenge to CNN’s dominance. You have beaten CNN, but you did it by becoming the mouthpiece for the Republican spin machine. This became quite evident during your not too recent coverage of the tsunami in south Asia and Hurricane Katrina.

Since you are not a news gathering organization, all of your hosts stayed tethered to your desks in New York. Instead of reporting on the human drama, you nodded your heads in agreement that tsunamis are bad.

Somehow Sheppard Smith was able to get out of the womb and report about the horrific state in New Orleans, and for that he has our respect. But when he threw it back to the studio, everyone there couldn’t talk about the hurricane – they did the only thing they knew how. They sat there and became the mouthpiece for the failed response of the administration.

And finally, the most prolific item your network has given America is Bill O’Reilly. We’re mixed on him – we think he’s an idiot, but he’s such a good idiot we’re glad he’s there, if only for the sake of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show.

Right now, we’re getting a kick out of his latest claim, that he’s being targeted by al-Qaeda. According to O’Reilly, the FBI recently told him he’s on an al-Qaeda Death List. The claim was greeted with skepticism and outright disbelief by other news organizations, people at his own network and the FBI. Papa bear, Rupert Murdoch, must be so proud right now.

So, we offer a toast to the network filled with enough spin to give the entire campus whiplash. We’re slightly interested to see how the next ten years turn out.