David Kronke was appointed Mayor of Television after a bloodless coup in 2000. Since then, he has improved infrastructure, championed greater educational opportunities and fought for reforms that have utterly erased corruption and incompetence from the television industry. Since Mr. Kronke has ascended to power, Television is a far better place. Fox and the News Hounds
As the Republican War Machine sputters, the wheels, it seems, are likewise rattling off Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel. First, we have this report that Wikipedia entries are being tidied up or mucked with, depending on whether you work for Fox or are MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, from computers inside Fox News. Bill O’Reilly’s sexual harassment suit, for example, got loofah’d from his Wikipedia bio, while Olbermann got discretely smeared.
To be fair, Fox News is hardly the only perpetrator: Computers inside The New York Times and even the Vatican have offered some stilted editorializing on Wikipedia. Stephen Colbert, who elevated Wikivandalism to an art form, suddenly has a lot to answer for.
OK, so on that one, we’ll just say that Fox News is just keeping up with the Joneses. But this next item offers sliminess on only a level Fox News can manage: Fox’s John Gibson mocked Jon Stewart’s heartfelt monologue on the first night he aired after Sept. 11, 2001, and called him a “phony.” And he did this, by way of justifying that lunatic Philadelphia Daily News column begging for another terrorist attack.
Anyone who heard what Stewart said that night knew he was speaking from the heart. In fact, the fact that Stewart has gotten even more obstreperous since then speaks not to his phoniness but to his anger over how the country was so quickly divided following that sudden burst of patriotic fervor and the belligerence of those still trying to attack critics of the war. Still, Fox News (which recently cancelled its ripoff of “The Daily Show,” apparently since O’Reilly et al were consistently funnier) persists in painting critics of this Administration as unhinged, leftist lunatics, which means that only about 70% of the country are unhinged, leftist lunatics.
Murdoch’s crew doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo: Although Fox News, by damning anyone leaning left of the far right, may have helped usher us into this war, there are precious few folks marching in lockstep behind their banner these days. But that doesn’t really matter, because cable TV only needs the Kool-Aid-drinking True Believers to keep watching to draw decent ratings, and that’ll always be enough for Fox News. On the other hand, more people seem to be joining the ranks of the reality-based community, as a Bush Administration guy (suspected to be Karl Rove) once disparaged them to the New York Times, though a few too many seem willing to check out of reality altogether and focus on the troubled starlet du jour.
Hiram Johnson, a Republican senator in California, stated, during World War I, “The first casualty, when war comes, is truth,” and he never even saw the Fox News Channel: He died on Aug. 6, 1945, the day the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.