Weapons Of Mass Stupidity - (Or only stupid people watch FoxNews - Barf)

Creative Loafing (Charlotte) ^ | June 4, 2003 | HAL CROWTHER

[TaxRelief]

Fox News hits a new lowest common denominator

...The wondrous blessing God bestowed on Gustave Flaubert -- and on America's own great chroniclers of contagious stupidity, Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken -- is that they lived and died without imagining a thing like Fox News. It's easy to laugh at Rupert Murdoch's outrageous mongrel, the impossible offspring of supermarket tabloids, sitcom news spoofs, police-state propaganda mills and the World Wrestling Federation.

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.

[TaxRelief]

This man, in one endless rant, bashes American institutions like Mark Twain and Oliver North. He declares all watchers of Fox News stupid, bigoted and frightened little children. He wails on Rupert Murdoch and every thing he touches. He slanders our president and the entire White House and ridicules patriotism the way atheists ridicule Christianity.

What an amazing and calculated attempt to turn the "intellectual elite" away from fair and balanced news.

However, all is not lost, because Mr. Crowther's endless vitriolic destroys any chance of his aspirations to be just like Maureen Dowd.

[hole_n_one]

Crowther...

[ChadGore]

Re: What an amazing and calculated attempt to turn the "intellectual elite" away from fair and balanced news.

"The problem with our liberal friends is not that they know so much, but that they know so much that isn't so."
--
Ronald Reagan

[TaxRelief]

Crowther's caricature of Murdoch:

[hole_n_one]

I swear I hate to stoop to Nazi analogies; but if Joseph Goebbels had run his own cable channel, it would have been indistinguishable from Fox News.

What a miserable, despicable soul he is.

[TaxRelief]

How insulting to most Americans, including everyone who enjoys FoxNews...

[Reagan Man]

Hal Crowther is a POS!

This post belongs over at DU. Not on FR!

[BfloGuy]

The critics of Fox News never mention Brit Hume or Tony Snow who are the real news there. They can only criticize the issue-oriented shows that admittedly have a bias.

[Buckeroo]

I want you to post "Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain upon FreeRepublic on a separate thread devoted to the discussion of the book and tell me what happens.

[zip]

MEGA BARF ALERT

[TaxRelief]

What is a POS?

BTW, I think people need to see the tactics used to stop our young people from hearing the conservative point-of-view. A lot of Freepers have kids in their 20's and 30's and they need to know what their kids are being blind-sided with.

[Texas_Jarhead]

"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."

I didn't need to read any furhter than this. I saw this interview and I was thoroughly disgusted by the kid's gushing anti-Americanism. O'Reilly took him to task but all the punk could repeat was Zinn/Chomksy propoganda. He really was a piece of trash.

[Texas_Jarhead]

POS = piece of something

[lonestar]

You prefer the propaganda of CNN?

[NormsRevenge]

they're mentally unbalanced individuals whose partisan belligerence is pressing them to the brink of psychosis.

It takes one to know one!

[Sparta]

I want you to post "Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain upon FreeRepublic on a separate thread devoted to the discussion of the book and tell me what happens.

Do it then.

[TruthFactor]

More evidence that FOX News is making an impact and that the liberals are worried about it.

[longtermmemmory]

I swear I hate to stoop to Nazi analogies; but if Joseph Goebbels had run his own cable channel, it would have been indistinguishable from Fox News.

** ***** ***** *** * * * *

We have that. But the Nazi inner circle was a bunch of homosexul butches. We have it on all the Network Channels. We have it on Lifetime and Oxygen and every "oprah" show. The regressive left has given us hate crimes and "mandatory acceptance or its a thought crime". The regressive left attempts to steal our children with glsen and making mother and father four letter words. The Nazi's were leftist socialist darwinians, a fact lost on democrat party talking points and socialist faithful.

[Buckeroo]

Are you the same person over on LibertyPost that rants&raves?

[Huber]

I especially like the following quote from the article:

"Liars with secret agendas are treating Americans like frightened children. If that sounds like a cry from the Left, get a transcript of Sen. Robert Byrd's remarks to the Senate on May 21. Byrd, nobody's liberal by any stretch of the imagination, accuses the White House of constructing "a house of cards, built on deceit," to justify its war on Iraq."

I feel reassured now that I know that Robert Byrd is not a liberal.