Fox (Not-So)News

When you’re in a hospital, your choices typically become limited. Indeed, most of your options will tend to come from the mass market, generic side of things. That’s how I found myself watching Fox News again for the first time in a very long time, because that is what was being offered. I found the experience depressing. Apparently, the good people at Fox are trapped in a bubble that has them reliving 2010 all over again.

The show opened with the anchorettes pulling their skirts up another three inches and the boy anchors practicing their outraged faces... grrr... grrr! They immediately dove into the vital stories of the day:

● Why does Hollywood hate a genuine American film like American Sniper, whaled the anchor! (I guess being nominated for Best Picture is evidence of hate?). A panel was introduced and they all accused Hollywood of anti-American and anti-military bias, but provided no support for these assertions other than their supposed “hatred” for films like this... again, no support was offered. Then they finished by bizarrely telling us that “this the type of film Hollywood and its liberal base” won’t make... even though they did make the film and even nominated it for big awards.

● Like lightening, we suddenly switched to the “story” of a bright young GOP presidential candidate named Marco Rubio. The whole story entailed Charles Krauthammer stating on another Fox show that he guesses Rubio has a 30% of being the nominee. That was the whole story.

● Next, they told us the GOP has a new plan to stop ISIS, and since Obama hasn’t jumped on board this plan within the first few days, the talking heads became outraged that “Obama just won’t do anything to stop ISIS!” They then bolstered their opinions by noting that Obama promises to close Gitmo, a promise he first made a decade ago and has repeated every year since.... and never did anything about.

● Then they turn to the smugrage of the day. Apparently, some school lunch server sent a nasty note to the parent of a child over the contents of the child’s lunch. What prompted this was the massive amount of junk in the lunch. Fox, however, presented this differently. First, they noted that the parent is a doctor, as if that puts them beyond reproach rather than increasing the reproach for the horrible lunch. Then the anchor looked at the obviously obese child and he announced: “You look healthy.” Really? He then asked if she ate this every day, which she said she did, and he declared that it looked delicious. He finished by expressing his outrage that a school official would tell a parent that their fat-inducing lunch, which is unacceptable under school policies, would dare say such a thing!

● Finally, we came to Romney. A panel was called to discuss what his run could mean. They never really talked about him though. Instead, this group concluded that this represented a rare moment for conservative Republicans... yep. See, Romney, Christie and Bush will split the “powerful moderate vote” three ways, allowing a genuine conservative like Rubio to “finally” give “conservative a voice.”

Interestingly, they seemed to assume a world in which conservatives have never had a way to get moderates to listen to them... as if the Tea Party or Religious Right or Goldwater or Reagan or Newt never existed.

What really struck me watching this half hour of Fox News was how completely blind they have been to the last ten years. Their analysis basically assumes there was never a Tea Party and they recommend that conservatives band together to rise up and take over the party, as if the last election wasn’t the undoing of that very thing. And didn’t Rubio rise and then explode on the fickle shores of genuineness?

Even more, though, it struck me that Fox is trapped in the petty politics of the past. These same stories first appeared on Fox in similar forms almost ten years ago. What’s more, look at the utter lack of news value to any of these. Some lunch lady sent a nasty note. So what? How does that affect anyone other than those two people? Should we designate Rubio as the frontrunner based on the opinion of one of our anchors? Talk about fabricating stories. So the party is dominated by moderates who only lose when they split the vote three ways, yet Fox asserts that the public wants conservatism?

This is the most tired of tired scripts. I almost expected stories related to Clinton’s infidelities, White Water, and the response to the OJ verdict. This is what a worn out propagandists looks like... not a news service.