Scooping the apocalypse.

Over in her Slate blog, Dana Stevens has created the Cable News Cretinisms, a weekly award for "the most absurd, stand-alone quotes from the round of cable talk shows: those that, even decontextualized from their yammerfest of origin, still manage to lower the level of discourse all by themselves and be funny into the bargain."

Check out the first winner. It's from Sean Hannity (duh) during his "interview" with the President:

Is it possible—is it a reality that we could turn on our television sets one day—Fox News Channel I hope—and find out that America is—that a nuclear weapon has gone off here—that a biological agent has been released or a chemical agent—is that a reality?

Here's the problem: there'd be something poetic about watching the apocalypse unfold on FOX, but I know I couldn't because I might miss Ted Turner's specially-designed-end-of-the-world tape that he's created for CNN. In case you missed the whole Teddy-doomsday-video deal here it is (as per the New York Daily News-- alas, the link is dead):

Turner, it seems, has been a doom-and-gloom kind of guy from the very day in June 1980 when he launched the cable network. He said then, as only he could, "We gonna go on air June 1, and we gonna stay on until the end of the world. When that time comes, we'll cover it, play 'Nearer, My God, to Thee,' and sign off." Ten years later, I'm told, Turner used CNN production facilities to create what he called his "end-of-the-world" video. Sources tell me it consists of a recording of "Nearer, My God," over footage of a waving American flag. Turner is said to have ordered the tape locked away until it was determined that the world was about to end. "It was like a sign-off tape that you often see in the middle of the night," says one source. "But to Ted, it was a sign-off forever."'

See? When the end times come, make it CNN.