808s and Bold Takes Issue 26: The F'd Up Fox News Five
A call for feedback on the newsletter and a ranking of the five worst people on Fox News
(Image via Johnny Silvercloud)
Hello and welcome to 808s and Bold Takes. I know I’ve said this before, but I’m going to get on a schedule. From now on, you’ll be able to expect a newsletter in your inbox every single Monday morning. That’s my promise to you, the readers, but I do need your help.
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Now, let’s get to today’s topic.
The F’d Up Fox News Five
Fox News is widely ridiculed by… well, basically anyone who cares about journalistic ethics. In an era of hyper-polarization, they stand out as a media outlet that has completely abandoned any idea of being anything other than right-wing propaganda.
Those words may sound harsh, but they’re deserved. Fox News sucks, but rather than get mad at them, I’ve decided that my time is better spent ridiculing them. Without further ado, here’s my list of the worst people on Fox News.
Honorable Mention: Fox and Friends
The network’s morning program seems to be the show that President Trump watches when he wakes up, as many of his tweets mirror segments on the show from just minutes earlier. He said in an interview on the show, “I get the word out on your show. I love your show.”
Google tells me that the main hosts of the show are Brian Kilmeade and Ainsley Earhardt, but I prefer to refer to them as Old White Guy #17 and Blond Lady #8 from the revolving cast of clones the TV network keeps in their basement.
5: Tomi Lahren
I’m not totally sure if Lahren is eligible to be on this list, as she technically doesn’t host a show on Fox News. Instead, she hosts a program on Fox Nation. No, I don’t know what Fox Nation is, and I’m not going to lie to you, I’m too scared to Google it and find out.
I’m just going to assume that Fox Nation is where you finally find out the question that’s been plaguing all of society since 2013: What does the fox say?
We don’t talk enough about how weird 2013 was. Just saying.
Back to Lahren: she’s abominable, she once compared Black Lives Matter to the KKK, and I honestly don’t have many more jokes about her because I find her both annoying and incredibly unimportant.
4: Jesse Watters
Jesse Watters hosts a show titled Watters World.
That sounds like the worst waterpark ever. It’s the waterpark you go to after you’ve procrastinated planning a summer vacation and everything else was either closed or full. You go there and the water is tinged slightly green, the lazy river is entirely stagnant and probably filled with leaves, and clumps of dirt (or worse) are floating along with the few participants brave enough to test the waters. Halfway through the only slide the park offers, you’re bound to get stuck and have to push yourself down while surrounded by the memories (and stench) of sweaty kids stuck in the same position you’re in right now.
Are there lifeguards? Yeah, of course there are, but they, like the fact-checkers at Fox News, are constantly looking the other way.
3: Sean Hannity
On the serious side of matters, Sean Hannity gave up any remaining semblance of journalistic credibility he ever had (and let me tell you folks, he didn’t have much to spare) when he stood on stage at one of Donald Trump’s rallies. It was an action so drastic that even Fox News reprimanded him for it, which is very much like saying the Sinister Six fined Mysterio for being too villainous.
Hannity is also generally stupid, and his book is a prime example of why. The original cover of Hannity’s latest book, “Live Free or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink”, had a Latin phrase on it.
“vivamus vel libero perit Americae”
On his show, Hannity said that those words meant “live free or America dies.” Except that’s not what it says at all. Spencer McDaniel, a college student, saw the phrase and was bewildered. He translated the Latin text in his blog post as “Let’s live or he… passes away from America for the detriment of a free man.”
In other words, gibberish.
The next question most inquiring minds, McDaniel one of them, asked was how the hell did Hannity get that as the translation?
Well, Sean did what I and so many other high school language students did: he went to Google Translate. The text on the book cover is exactly what you find if you type “live free or America dies” into the website. Here’s the thing, and if you all had half-competent language teachers, you’ll agree with what I’m about to say: you only did that once. You only used Google Translate once, because those teachers called you out on it and made sure you never did it again.
It looks like Hannity learned his lesson as well because the Latin phrasing was mysteriously changed to “Vivamus liberi ne America pereat” which translates much more cogently to, “Let us live free so that America will not die.”
2: Laura Ingraham
If the rotating cast of blonde women on Fox and Friends and Tomi Lahren were the guards on the entry path to the palace in Super Mario, then Laura Ingraham is definitely Bowser.
The ability to spit gigantic hot balls of gas that destroys everything in its path? That’s the racism, which is often poorly disguised. Listen, if you’re going to blow a dog whistle, at least make it a little bit more nuanced? Watch two spectacular comedians, Desus and Mero, dismantle her racist tirade against LeBron James here after she told him to “shut up and dribble.”
But wait! There’s more. Here she is apparently giving a Nazi salute after speaking at the Republican National Convention in 2016.
Continuing with the Bowser metaphor, the ability to turn into a spinning shell that annihilates anything it touches? That’s the homophobia, which again is anything but subtle. It goes back to her college days, when she was the editor of the Dartmouth student newspaper, one that secretly recorded a meeting of the school’s Gay Straight Alliance.
Even her own brother, Curtis Ingraham, has denounced her. Ingraham, who’s a gay man, called his sister a monster to the Daily Beast. She’s also equated same-sex marriage to polygamy and incest.
In other words, she sucks. In a world less horrific than ours, she would be a clear and easy number one choice in this ranking. Yet somehow, there’s one person who’s worse.
1: Tucker Carlson
I find Carlson very interesting because unlike Hannity and most other Fox News hosts, he seems to have an understanding of the economic inequality in America. In rare instances, you could look at some of what he says and agree, especially with some of his rhetoric with billionaires. He’s praised the economic policies of individuals like Elizabeth Warren in the past and before he was a TV host, he was a well-regarded magazine writer.
The problem is that Carlson uses his view of right-wing populism as another vessel to promote white supremacy, xenophobia, and flat out racism on his show. He’s said that letting immigrants from impoverished countries into the USA would make it dirtier. He’s said that white supremacy isn’t a real problem in the United States. His lead writer, Blake Neff, resigned from the show after a number of his racist and misogynistic posts surfaced. Neff was the man who once said that the first draft of anything Carlson read off the teleprompter was written by him.
That doesn’t even cover it all, as Carlson’s comments about women (where he said they needed to be quiet, were primitive, and were like dogs) from a few years ago surfaced.
Here’s the worst part about Carlson and Fox News. They’re widely popular. Here are some details from the New York Times.
“In June and July, Fox News was the highest-rated television channel in the prime-time hours of 8 to 11 p.m. Not just on cable. Not just among news networks. All of television. The average live Fox News viewership in those hours outstripped cable rivals like CNN, MSNBC and ESPN, as well as the broadcast networks ABC, CBS and NBC, according to Nielsen.”
Yikes. That’s a lot of Americans constantly listening to Hannity, Ingraham, Watters Carlson, Lahren, and yes, the individuals at Fox and Friends whose names I’ve already forgotten. The impact that’s having on Americans cannot be overstated, the prime example being what’s in the White House today.
For aggrieved conservative white people, there’s no better place to turn than to Fox News to hear about how immigrants, gay people, and liberals are making America a worse place to live. It’s that kind of coverage, skewed so far to the right that it’s nowhere near reality.
It’s the kind of coverage that denied the seriousness of COVID-19 for a long time, causing many individuals to not take the disease seriously with catastrophic effects. It’s the kind of coverage that gave us the Tea Party. It’s the kind of coverage that gave us Donald Trump. It’s the kind of coverage that further radicalizes parts of the nation into thinking that people who are different from them are individuals who need to be feared and in most cases removed, peacefully or otherwise.
In short, it’s F’d up.
That’s all for this week; stay safe.
- VS