I Read the News Today

In case you had somehow not noticed, because my heart beats on the left side of my body, my politics more often than not reflects that physical manifestation in my philosophy. I don’t dislike the Fox News Channel (FNC) because it’s a partisan mouthpiece for a Republican party whose most recent impact on my life was to send me on unpaid vacation for seventeen days at the start of the fiscal year to prove a point they ultimately abandoned.

I was paid for the days I wasn’t allowed to work making the entire exercise moot unless you are an American Tealiban about whom I find it hard to ever say a kind word. In fairness, if you lean that way, I’ll wait while you click ‘close’ and move to something that's elsewhere on the Interwebs [and if it helps, you are why I’ll never vote for another Republican in my life-consider it hardening of the political arteries, mine and yours]. Thanks.

The FNC are very good at what they do. All their talking heads are quite handsome and/or very pretty, dressed more for a cocktail party on a Koch Brothers yacht (or oil tanker) than a town hall meeting, or a neighborhood watch. They look like the kind of folks who have their barbecues catered and whose paddock for their polo ponies is worth more than my house. And that’s fine, from each and to each.

No. I actually dislike MSNBC for its obnoxious parroting of some of the Farthest Left Vitriol produced at our Seat of Government, Dodge City y’all, where they use the volume of sanctimonious stridency to mask the absence of facts on whatever issue they are over-wrought about. 

Watch C-SPAN for an hour when the House is debating…anything. I have run out of motion sickness bags so I’ve turned off the volume and recommend playing something by Megadeath to serve as the audio. “So Far, So Good…So What?” will do, and good luck.

FNC does a fine job of articulating and toeing the line embodied by the Death Star ideology of Cheney and the Drones You Seek (still think that should be the name of a grunge band). Their applied veneer of impartiality is almost completely dry and practically flawless. It covers and conceals.

The about 4.3 million 18-49 year old predominantly white men who comprise the FNC core audience eat their stuff up with a spoon. That’s okay with me-it keeps that crowd off the streets, out of the bars and away from the women. It’s weird seeing gun racks on Saabs but to each his own I suppose.

Admittedly, the FNC rating pales when you look at any of the broadcast networks’ evening news ratings, the lowest ranked of which still pulls in almost twice the numbers Fox claims. But that’s just the kind of pesky fact and wider perspective that FNC so resolutely ignores and avoids.

FNC has no interest in the nuances of geo-politics so it simplifies decades of struggle on economic justice reducing it all to shrieks about millions of illegals’ children pouring over our borders. Pre-thought thoughts, just swallow.

It provides a platform to the same crypto-fascists who created a Where’s Waldo search in 2003 for imaginary WMDs to blame the inevitability of the result of the last four hundred years of middle-eastern politics on a White House it loathed from the day it took office. Can you say, “Mission Accomplished?” I knew you could.

If I had to label myself it would be as a “Relentless Pragmatist” who feels news should be like argon gas, odorless, tasteless with neither volume nor mass. News was never about partisanship, gotcha journalism or ‘bombshell’ revelations. It was, and should always be, a delivery of factual information without speculation, embellishment or bias.

Murrow, Cronkite, Reasoner, Reynolds, Jennings, Brokaw, Huntley and Brinkley and dozens more all struggled to keep their personal prejudices out of the stories they reported. And now? Your agent wants you to throw a snowball at the weather girl to undercut the climate-change story. 

I found this on the FNC web site, “Stewart and Colbert Changing Their Tune?” which looks like an actual news story-except…..dammit, Jon and Steve are on another network whose most-watched program is a badly drawn cartoon. Their offerings are not produced by their network’s news division (I doubt Comedy Central even has a news division-if they did, it would be news to them I suspect). 

Wait until FNC turns its attention towards John Oliver. Oh buddy, that will NOT be pretty. What! Oliver isn’t even an American, is he? Double Yahtzee! Actually, potato, potatoe. Meet the New Boss, lather, rinse, repeat. Apples, meet Oranges. Oranges, where are you going with that juicer in your hand?

So FNC is swinging at comedians on mock news shows because they have poked them in the eye with a sharp stick on more than one occasion. Sort of like the English National Team beating Our Lady of Perpetual Motion's U-21 Summer Soccer Camp team 11-0, proving they are, too, good footballers, so there, nyah! (Too soon, Wayne?)

And you can bet the What Nots and Hottentots who drool as Bill and Megyn start to deliver the Word According to Roger Ailes are sliding into full salivation mode believing if we just remove that pesky “i” we’ll be that much closer to Heaven and a return to America being the greatest nation on earth.  

- bill kenny