Go Back to the B3 Home Page
Complaints, compliments, arguments? Email me.
[<< "You find cool links in the damndest ways sometimes..."] [Archive Index] [>>"Okay, now I'm awake enough....."]
06/07/2003 Archived Entry: "'Creative Loafing' starts slapping and just can't stop."
'Creative Loafing' starts slapping and just can't stop.
If there is a more scathing, funny and accurate appraisal of Fox News out there than this, I haven't read it.
Fox News is an oxymoron and Cheech and Chong would have made a more credible team of war correspondents than Geraldo Rivera and Ollie North. Neither Saturday Night Live nor the 1973 film Network, Paddy Chayefsky's corrosive satire of TV news, could even approach the comic impact of Geraldo embedded, or of Fox's pariah parade, its mothball fleet of experts who always turn out to be disgraced or indicted Republican refugees. If Ed Meese, Newt Gingrich and Elliott Abrams couldn't fill your sails with mirth, you could count on the recently deposed Viceroy of Virtue and High Regent of Rectitude, my old schoolmate Blackjack Bill Bennett. With its red-faced, hyperventilating reactionaries and slapstick abuse of lame "liberal" foils who serve them as crash dummies, Fox News could easily be taken as pure entertainment, even as inspired burlesque of the rightwing menagerie. But the problem -- in fact, the serious problem - is that Fox isn't kidding, and brownshirts aren't funny.
Harper's reports that Fox commentator Bill O'Reilly became so infuriated by the son of a 9-ll victim who opposed the war -- "I'm against it and my father would have been against it, too" -- that he cursed the man and even threatened him off-camera. A Fox TV anchor, one Neil Cavuto, celebrated the fall of Baghdad by informing all of us who opposed the war in March, "You were sickening then, you are sickening now." If reports are accurate, these troubled men are neither bad journalists nor even bad actors portraying journalists -- they're mentally unbalanced individuals whose partisan belligerence is pressing them to the brink of psychosis.
Replies: 3 people speak up
That was brilliant, eloquent, and horribly depressing.
We are DOOMED, DOOMED, I tell ya'. Sorry, I had to get that out of my system...
Like I said before, 64.7% of Americans believe that 23 of those 19 hijackers were from Iraq.
Posted by Metropolitan99 @ 06/07/2003 08:41 PM NY
I can't even begin to imagine the tremendous satisfaction the author must have felt after completing this article--the satisfaction one feels when someone has written something damn good.
I made a copy of it and plan to e-mail it to some friends--everyone needs to read this.
Posted by Ivan @ 06/07/2003 09:50 PM NY
Great link and for another slap down try this.
http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/Opinion/Editorials/03OpOPN3060303.htm
Posted by more slap downs @ 06/08/2003 10:40 AM NY
