July 05, 2011, 1:26 PM — Criminal-punkish as most of their lulz were, and as much as I like public radio organizations for the quality of their news, it was pretty funny when LulzSec posted a story on PBS.org that claimed Tupac Shakur was alive and well and living in New Zealand.
The funniest part was the remote possibility that if it were true, PBSers are the ones who would be so persistent in their investigation of Tupac's murder and hip-hop-related issues in general that it would be the one to break the news Tupac was hiding in Middle Earth.
Fox News, viewed in the same media-stereotype-cartoony way as PBS, is at least as funny a target for a similar gag, not least because it is even less likely than PBS to go after stories about the murder of a black man, or a positive story about hip-hop culture, or, on certain Fox News programs, stories about African Americans that don't include the words "us" and "them."
So cracking FoxNews' Twitter feed Monday to post an item claiming Barak Obama had been assassinated had the same genuine potential for hilarity. Except that this story didn't bring a dead man back to life, it killed a live one.
And the live one it killed was the President of the United States.
And the President it killed is the first one who identifies as African American.
And that background is largely responsible for a record number of death threats against the president from people who resent one of Them being president – even one that, among Republican Presidents, is Reagan's league as a speaker and in the same international diplomacy/governmental management league as Bush pere.
So having the network most associated with the Tea Party, raving right-wing paranoia from the recently departed Glen Beck and persistent Know-Nothingness didn't have quite the frisson of satiric humor.
As wit it was more brick-to-the-head slapstick, made less funny by picking Fox as the outlet/victim because it was just believable enough from Fox to raise suspicions that the "hack" might be neo-con performance art posted at FoxNews.com on purpose.
