You probably don't watch much Fox News, do you? If that's the case, you're behind the times. Your impression of Fox News has been formed by folks like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Bill O'Reilly, and so forth. Conservative, sometimes crazy, but basically just political outrage artists.
That's not the Fox News of today. Hannity is still around, and so is Laura Ingraham, though she's been relegated to the 7 pm hour. The other two primetime spots are held down by Jesse Waters and Greg Gutfeld.
Waters and Gutfeld are not conventional TV shouters. They're sophomoric jokesters. Here is Bob Somerby's description of Gutfeld today:
As the program returned from commercial break, a jingle announced the nature of the new segment.... Producers played a brief video clip from "President Poopy Pants," a public figure also described as "the vegetable in chief."
In their homes around the nation, millions of citizens saw a sitting president referred to as "President Poopy Pants." In this moment, we start to see the intellectual and emotional horizons of the 59-year-old man.
Let us repeat the most surprising part of this tableau. This weirdly adolescent 59-year-old man is the nightly host of a primetime American "cable news" program. He assembles a four-member panel each night to help him discuss the news. His panels are larded with low-grade comedians, along with one former professional wrestling heavyweight champion.
This is what Fox News has been morphing into over the past couple of years. Gutfeld, Waters, The Five, and the morning crew have become increasingly juvenile and vacuous, promoting stories like the Taylor Swift conspiracy that even Hannity wouldn't have touched in days gone by.
Despite my endless harangues about how things are better than most people think they are, it's remarkable how much worse things can get even when you believe they've hit their nadir. If Israel wipes out Hamas, it probably won't matter because something worse will spring up in its place. Newt Gingrich was forced to leave politics but eventually got replaced by Donald Trump. Fox News seemed to have hit bottom with the likes of Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson, but after they left we ended up with Gutfeld and Watters.
H.L. Mencken allegedly said you can never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Primetime on Fox News is our best and final proof that he was right.
Out of curiosity I recently watched an opening segment from Ingraham's show. It was 7 minutes of how bad the economy is and how we are being invaded by brown people punctuated by "Weren't things so much better under Trump?" It is honestly terrifying that this is what people watch.
I don't watch Fox, and haven't for a while, so I don't know the answer to this question for sure, but is having Fox be juvenile comedians actually worse than it being fake newsmen? I mean it is obviously worse if they want to be taken seriously as a news entity. But is Fox going to be as successful at getting stories into the mainstream media while it is making president potty pants jokes? Will it be able to convince anybody but the already convinced of anything?
This sounds like a network trying desperately to hang onto its core audience in a way that makes it less likely to be dangerous.
This was precisely my thought. There's no pretense of fairness going on here.
Except that as its "news" becomes more the stuff of unhinged conspiracy theories and violent apocalyptic fantasies, the more that audience is radicalized and the farther we move away from a civic commons where we can at least agree on a baseline of empirical reality. We don't even have that anymore, largely thanks to Fox.
Late-night comedians on the broadcast networks now mostly do jokes in their monologues about how idiotically Trump and other Republicans are acting. Of course a lot of it is just clips of Trump and others acting idiotically, and these are not "news" programs. The network news programs are still ostensibly non-partisan. But this is a big change from previous generations of late-night hosts, who generally avoided politics. The right wing doesn't have broadcast TV networks, so their retaliation has to get onto Fox "News".
For the monologues, what else would you prefer Jimmy, Jimmy, Stephen and Seth to blather on about? Historically, it's been the not-incredibly serious news of the day (think of Carson). Colbert at least tends to cover incredibly serious news, albeit almost all of the Republicans-behaving-badly. Do you have specific ideas for things they should have talked about and failed to, in this context?
Jay Leno made jokes about Bill Clinton and a blue dress for what, over a decade? I don't think "things were different back then."
I'm sure Jay Leno is *still* making jokes about Bill Clinton and blue dresses.
Pretty good argument for my long held contention that Fox News isn't news, and is barely entertainment, but it is satire.
Fox News is like the hydra of hatefulness, except each two new heads are worse, too.
What Mencken actually did say (to within light paraphrase) is that Americans vote for candidates with whom they identify. Now think that through.
Yeah, Fox News. What happens when you give a national platform to the retarded assholes who populate every shitty bar in every shitty town in a country that hasn't dealt with its fetishization of “free speech.” Which is great in theory, not so great when directly responsible for the destruction of civil, civic society. Sure, give ‘em enough rope and they’ll eventually hang themselves - see: “Have you no shame?” - but in the meantime real people are manipulated, used, and exploited, and lives destroyed, by vicious, malevolent forces that couldn’t more clearly be demonstrating a fundamental weakness of our socio-political systems. In a functional society, Fox News as it is shouldn’t exist. It shouldn’t even be a possibility. Yet it is. Which means something is fundamentally wrong with our ideas of what’s allowable behavior and what’s not.
Again, it wouldn’t matter if it were just a drunk in a bar, whose words effect nothing. But Fox News has wreaked ungodly amounts of destruction, not least destruction of the human spirit. It shouldn’t exist, and a system that allows it is fundamentally flawed in its ideas concerning allowable speech and behavior.
"To reach the lowest point possible."
That's how Merriam-Webster defines "hitting rock bottom." What happens next? Best case scenario is step 1 of 12.
What Mencken is quoted as saying is: When the American public walks, it drags its knuckles on the ground.
Pingback: Links 2/11/24 | Mike the Mad Biologist