Worst [Dang] Promo in Television History?

So there I am in my easy chair, watching the World Series, when the announcer starts promoting a Fox TV feature called “The Best [Dang] Sports Show Period.”

He did not say dang. He said something else.

I would tell you what the word is, but they don’t allow it in my newspaper.

All right. So it’s not that big a deal, and my own language has never won me any Holy Cards.

But I’m thinking to myself, this is the World Series, you know? Here we are, early on a Sunday evening, with perhaps millions of kids watching the Yankees and Diamondbacks.

Does this announcer have to keep referring to “The Best [Dang] Sports Show Period”? Besides, what a vapid, moronic name.

But that’s not the worst of it. During a commercial break, Fox runs a promo for a sitcom that debuts mid-November, and God strike me dead if I didn’t bolt to the edge of my chair. Were my eyes deceiving me?

They have some guy sitting on a toilet, doing his business. I swear it.

Apparently it’s the star of “The Bernie Mac Show” (be sure to mark your calendar for this one, folks), and he has his pants around his ankles. It seems he’s out of toilet paper, so he’s calling out to a young girl to go get him some more.

Lovely, don’t you think? Rupert Murdoch, the ultraconservative media baron, Fox TV mogul and owner of the Dodgers, has to be proud. I think this sets a new standard.

It’s dinner hour on a Sunday evening, just six weeks after we were hit by terrorists who don’t like our politics or culture, and that was before they knew about Fox’s fall lineup.

Emmylou Harris is in the stadium to turn “God Bless America” into a soaring hymn of loss and hope, and Fox TV gives the nation a straight-on shot of Bernie Mac sitting on the can.

I wanted to flush my [dang] television.

When the little girl doesn’t produce the toilet paper in this clever scene--I’m assuming the writers are in junior high--Mac goes running down the hall after her, pants still down.

Funny, huh?

Only Mac’s shirttail spares us a full view of our collective descent into hell.

What’s going on here? Do they figure we’re all so inured to indecency, they can slip anything by us? Is Fox in a race to rock bottom with the WB, out to make a buck at any cost?

One minute you’re watching the balletic precision of a double-play, and the next minute you’re watching some clod take bathroom humor to a new low.

I wanted an explanation, and so I decided to call Rupert Murdoch himself. His Republican pals have been railing for years about the coarsening of our culture. So let’s hear what Rupert has to say about this latest benchmark.

“He’s down the hall with someone,” said a secretary at the News Corp. office in New York.

Well, have him call me, I said. The secretary took my number and I asked if, by chance, she had seen Bernie Mac sitting on the commode in the middle of the World Series.

She said she had.

So what did she think?

“I was very surprised,” she said. “Very surprised.”

You have to go talk to the boss, I told her. What if the series goes seven games, and we’ve got to watch this hack, night in and night out, plopped on the throne?

I don’t know if the secretary followed my advice, but she did add one thought about the toilet scene:

“It seemed like it was definitely a first for television.”

Maybe Murdoch was too busy sulking to get back to me right away. He’d just lost out on a bid to create a near-monopoly in satellite TV services, and his minions were in Washington trying to sabotage the winning bidder.

Murdoch tried for years to grab Hughes Electronics for his own empire but lost out to EchoStar Communications. By coincidence, Murdoch saw his hopes flushed Sunday night at roughly the same time Bernie Mac pulled the chain.

My second call to Murdoch was taken by a different secretary. This one hadn’t seen the Bernie Mac promo, so I painted a picture for her. She listened quietly, then said:

“I’m not a sports fan.”

I also tried three News Corp. vice presidents to see if anyone could explain why Fox would air what looked like a bad Charmin commercial, but none of them took up the challenge.

Fine. I’d rather hold out for the Big Cheese, anyway. I want to ask Murdoch about an incident in 1992, when he axed the president of Fox Television Stations after the guy hired a male stripper to surprise guests at a management conference.

Stephen Chao had a model disrobe on stage to make a point during a right-wing panel discussion on “The Threat to Democratic Capitalism Posed by Modern Culture.” Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne, were in the room.

“Sometimes the hardest job a captain has is to terminate his best lieutenant,” Murdoch said after firing Chao. “But one thing this company has to stand for is that there are limits.”

Indeed. Had Chao instructed the model to walk out on stage, drop his pants and sit on a toilet, he might have bonused.

I’ll let you know when Rupert gets back to me.

Steve Lopez writes Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com.