01:00 AM EST on Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Stop the presses!!!

Send the children out of the room.

Sit down and hold a loved one.

Fox News is reporting that it sent a sneak-and-peek patrol to a party at Brown University over the weekend. And what did it discover?

Sex.

Yup, on a college campus. It's a stunner, maybe a shocker.

It comes to us via the pipeline of right thinking -- Bill O'Reilly and The O'Reilly Factor.

OK, OK, I know Bill had that nasty little bump in the road a while back, that embarrassing telephone tussle with a Fox staffer who took issue with O'Reilly's steamy suggestions. But he seems to have recovered, exorcized his phone demons and gotten back to the business of drawing the line between the righteous and the heathen.

Fox, you might remember, is the network that brought us the early stages of the war in Iraq in a college football format -- cheering, color commentary. Now, it has brought us life in the Ivy League in the style of a guy who hunkers down on the front porch and steams up a window trying to see the sexy frolic inside.

It's apparently what passes for news on some channels these days. It's something that could be done on just about any campus at any time. College students sometimes party when they're not studying.

Fox producer Jesse Watters scored this fleshy scoop by buying, on the Internet, an $80 ticket to an event called Sex Power God. It is presented every year by the Queer Alliance at Brown.

Watters took a camera and videotaped the event. A lot of other people carried cameras so apparently he wasn't that noticeable. Neither he nor anyone at Fox News had told anyone at Brown that he was coming to expose the seedy social underbelly of a prestigious university.

And he reported back to O'Reilly that he saw sex and heard sex. He saw and heard it between men and between women. He saw people in their underwear.

Gawwwwlleeee!!!

Shazzzam!!!

O'Reilly scolded Brown on the air. He said it was inappropriate for the university to use part of student activities fees for such a party.

The problem is, activities fees were not used for Sex Power God, according to a university spokesman. But this is Fox News.

Brown students are not enjoying their unintended celebrity. But then they haven't exactly covered themselves in glory on the social front lately.

For a while now, neighbors of the university have been complaining that student parties have spilled over in sometimes loud and ugly ways. There is apparently no guarantee that with high tuition comes an increased sense of social responsibility. At Saturday's event, some students had to leave in ambulances due to assorted excesses. High tuition also doesn't guarantee a sense of personal limits.

So Brown officials have decided to take a long overdue look at campus party policy. There could be changes.

And now, thanks to Fox News and its own roving party animal, thousands of people across the country know that at some parties at Brown University in Providence, students have sex.

It appears to be the kind of thing Fox viewers long for -- a look inside the kinds of places where liberals surely lurk and do liberal things with their clothes off. It's reassuring to those who want to be sure deep down that they live lives Bill O'Reilly would approve of.

Was it news? Of course not. It was a sneaky, pointless piece of work. And that darned near guarantees it a place on television.

Bob Kerr can be reached by e-mail at bkerr@projo.com