"Patron asks gym in left-leaning Columbia to tune out Fox News" read the teaser headline on the BaltimoreSun.com's front page this morning.
So wait, it's news when a liberal in a left-leaning city in a deeply blue-state Maryland gripes about Fox News being featured on the TV at her gym? Apparently to the Sun, it is.
Sun staff writer Larry Carson explained that this isn't your run-of-the-mill Democrat, however (emphasis mine):
Ann Geddes doesn't want a "fair and balanced" workout. But the 49-year-old worker for a nonprofit agency is having no luck getting the channel changed in front of her favorite rowing machine at a Columbia gym.
The television happens to be tuned permanently to Fox News. Geddes, a liberal Democrat and former legislative aide to a Howard County delegate, said she can't stomach the conservative lineup that appears nightly as she gets her exercise. Even though the sound is off, the words scrolling across the bottom of the screen infuriate her.
"It makes my blood pressure go up," she said.
Befitting the democratic (with a small "d") pedigree of a planned community founded on the principle of races and classes living side by side, Geddes has taken her complaint up the chain of command, from the attendant at the gym run by the Columbia Association to the new president of the giant homeowners' group.
She's had no success. Now she's going public.
Of course, by going public, Geddes may very well look like a jackass, even to liberal Sun readers. She has a "favorite rowing machine"? Seriously?
It turns out only a few of the TVs in the gym are tuned to Fox News, that there's a wide variety of cable channels on the gyms big-screen TVs, and that a UNANIMOUS vote of a committee of club members endorsed the TV lineup (emphasis mine):
Bob Bellamy, the Columbia Association's director of operations, said 43,000 people use the Supreme Sports Club facility yearly, and Geddes is the only one who has complained.
The association's Health and Fitness Advisory Committee, composed of club users, "unanimously endorsed the current selection of stations," Bellamy said.
"She called me up and wanted me to take Fox News off all the TVs," he said, gesturing to the six big flat-screens fixed to the main exercise room wall.
The Fox screen is directly in front of the rowing machine Geddes prefers, though a second one two feet away faces a screen showing NBC. Others broadcast local stations, CNN, ESPN, MSNBC, the Food Network, Discovery Channel and HGTV.
Nelson said some like the conservative network. "As soon as we ban Fox News from our recreation facilities, I will get calls from that side," he said.
Geddes said she's feeling brushed off and doesn't accept the explanation from association officials that Fox is the highest-rated cable news channel. She says that can't be the case in liberal-leaning Columbia, and she insists she is not giving up.
On second thought, I'm kinda glad the Sun ran this story. It's not every day we see a left-leaning paper report a story that makes a liberal with hydrophobic Fox News derangement look as petty as she really is.
