Ew alert: bedbugs at Fox News!

From a small item the other day in The New York Times:

In an interview on Monday, Warren Vandeveer, senior vice president for operations and engineering at Fox News, said the cable channel had realized it had a problem a few weeks ago, when an employee “caught a bug and showed it to us.” An exterminator determined that the incursion was limited to a “very small area in the newsroom.”

Naturally, the blogs piled on: here's Gawker speculating just who brought the critters in (Shep Smith is their best guess). Turns out it's an ongoing problem: I found a November 2007 item in TVNewser that reported bedbugs in another area of the Fox newsroom. But lest you blast us for picking on Fox, they're not the only org with a sanitation problem: HuffPost points out that the ladies of The View complained recently on air to ABC CEO Bob Iger of a rat infestation in their dressing rooms.

Even the hallowed halls of TIME aren't safe. Last fall I (with the aid of two colleagues) battled a woolly mammoth of a cockroach skittering across my office floor. Its scarred carcass somehow wound up in the crevice between my desk and the window, where I believe it still rests in peace. It's okay; we're moving offices next week, so I figure the next tenant can contend with its decomposed ghost.

Here's a really scary film about bedbugs from BraveNewFilms. Best watched over lunch.