As this Media Matters research item indicates, Fox News has been much less interested in covering the Haiti earthquake as compared to the cabler's competitors. This doesn't really surprise me, and for two reasons.

First, outside of Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel, Fox News doesn't do foreign coverage. Period. It has no commitment to global journalism. And second, because the Haiti natural disaster does not have an obvious partisan angle, Fox News doesn't really know what to do. Without an RNC, Obama-hating talking point to guide the newsroom, Fox News seems clearly adrift as they grapple with practicing actual who/what/where/why/how journalism. (It's like trying to speak that second language that you haven't used since high school.)

But Fox News' abdication of its news gathering responsibilities is not new. The cabler did the same thing in the wake of the 2004 tsunami.

At the time, I noted this at Salon:

Whereas rival CNN has torn up its regular programming and dispatched an army of staffers to the ravaged region, Fox News appears to be going through the motions on the colossal story. Rather than breaking news, Fox feeds off partisan sparks. And it's hard to get angry about a natural disaster because empathy does not lend itself to outrage -- although that hasn't stopped the high-priced talking heads at Fox from trying to turn the tsunami into a contentious issue.

If the Republican National Committee doesn't have an angle on the story, then neither, apparently, does Fox News. And the last time we checked, there were no GOP talking points on natural disasters of biblical proportions.