On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television The Fa k e News Wars By Marvin Kitman PLAYING WITH my remote the other Sunday night, I stumbled upon the Fox News Channel. The President was speaking to us from the...
...Like Dracula, even Saturday Night Live sometimes climbs out of the coffin...
...It is simply routine doctrinaire liberal bashing, the hallmark of the lack of civility in political discourse found elsewhere on Fox News...
...It was a true story and needed the needling...
...At any rate, that is my idea of real satire...
...Nor is there conservative humor to speak of—except for the odd Presidential press conference where it is explained that we are winning the war in Iraq...
...Surnow and his mirth makers made just two episodes of the show (the second one ran on March 4...
...There will be plenty of opportunity, to judge from the Clinton era—and particularly if Al Bore is the surprise victor...
...K— JL^ Roger Ailes is expecting a Democrat victory in 2008...
...Kurt Long and Jenn Robertson, however, are no Chevy Chase or Jane Curtin...
...It featured O’Reilly debating someone who disagreed with him...
...Satire has not had any real impact since the Dwight D. Eisenhower Administration, when politicians took it seriously...
...One satirist has already described his nonpolitical appearance at this year’s Oscars as “a statue holding a statue...
...This past February 24, it did a big takeoff on Wolf Blitzer and CNN’s coverage of the Anna Nicole story...
...Why is a vehicle whose first mission is to blow away The Daily Show using a format based on Saturday Night Live (or “Saturday Night Dead,” as it is referred to nowadays) and its “Weekend Update...
...They had a guy imitating Wolf...
...It can’t have axioms to grind...
...It was the reason George W. Bush wasn’t elected in 2000 and 2004...
...These are the people who believe that if the Founding Fathers knew there would someday be a conservative channel trying to ridicule them, they would not have put the First Amendment in the Constitution...
...To work, satire has to be unpredictable, fearless, an equal opportunity offender, anarchistic...
...EST...
...The cable networks went 24/7...
...The guys started coming out of the woodwork: “Oh no, I’m the father...
...He played clips from a recent O’Reilly Factor, which Olbermann calls “The Fox News Comedy Hour...
...It reminded me that I am the father...
...He used to go on stage with the newspapers and get laughs by reporting in his droll way what Congress did that day...
...And their guest experts do not include an Emily Litella (Gilda Radner...
...I would like to have heard the tape of Joel Surnow convincing his boss Roger Ailes he is the Jonathan Swift of fake news...
...The trouble with Stewart’s show, everybody at Fox News knows, is that it is not fair and balanced, like Fox...
...If it weren’t for satire in the cabarets of the Weimar Republic, Hitler would have come to power...
...Nobody could write the stuff the folks in Washington now do or say...
...they are marching to their own or Fox owner Rupert Murdoch’s glockenspiel...
...These are the pilots, commissioned in 2006, and months were spent fine-tuning and polishing materials...
...Not being funny is no crime in TV comedy, but there are serious errors in the battle plan against The Daily Show...
...The host was cutting his opponent off, accompanied each time by a laugh track in the background...
...It is the electronic version of a Will Rogers act...
...The otherbits and interviews are filler, like the articles in Penthouse magazine...
...It is the FNC guided missile aimed at the heart of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show on the Comedy Central channel, an attempt to neutralize the literally tens of people (compared to network news audiences) who think Stewart’s show is the news...
...And I decided not to watch the second episode of The 1/2 Hour News Hour...
...I can see why...
...The President was speaking to us from the Oval Office...
...Nevertheless, The 1/2 Hour News Hour was viciously attacked by the Left loony media, as Fox News’ superstar news analyst Bill O’Reilly would describe the loyal opposition...
...Forget Iran...
...Perhaps I’m being too hard on The 1/2 Hour News Hour...
...Stewart, the skeptic-in-chief, sharpens his comic points by raising an eyebrow...
...It is as funny as 24...
...It reports the news, and distorts it, as those who refuse to watch other Fox News shows may argue...
...That’s a Fox command...
...The Fox management must enjoy sophomoric, and even freshmanic, humor...
...All of sudden Anna Nicole died and the war in Iraq had ended...
...But it is the new weapon of mass distraction Fox News is honing for the coming fake news wars, destined to be the talk of the next Presidential campaign...
...The days of a press secretary like Jim Hagerty attacking the late Art Buchwald for writing “unadulterated rot” about his boss, Ike, are long gone...
...Is there anything funnier than FNC’s motto, “Fair and Balanced...
...I thought I must have fallen asleep during the 24/7 coverage of Anna Nicole Smith on cable network news...
...Liberals are not amused by attempts to poke fun at them...
...Two comedians, Kurt Long and Jenn Robertson, play news anchors...
...Not to mention its most popular prime time hour, The O’Reilly Factor (8 P.M...
...Granted that SNL segment introduced the fake news concept...
...SATIRE has a hard time these days...
...It had a tough act to follow, the Fox News Channel itself...
...While he was trying to talk about the war (the one in Iraq), they kept showing pictures of Anna Nicole in sexy, low-cut dresses underneath him...
...Olbermann’s three minutes was more amusing than a whole half hour of The 1/2 Hour News Hour...
...Now everybody knows satire is a powerful weapon...
...The most distrusted name in fake news, some argue, is now firing back in what could be a historic battle of wits...
...It was all a joke, of course, a spoof, a hoax, a sophomore policy wonk’s wet dream—and the highlight of the new Fox News Channel experimental satire show, The 1/2 Hour News Hour, which debuted on February 18...
...The date of the speech, ID’d on the bottom of his desk, was January 21, 2009...
...Surnow should look it up...
...Instead of the double-edged rapiers or poisoned arrows that drive victims to delirium, 1/2 Hour sets them up in the shooting gallery and mows them down with AK-47 assault rifles, bazookas, grenade launchers, mortars, IUs, and nuclear warheads...
...Developed and cowritten by Joel Surnow, the executive producer of 24, Fox Entertainment’s hit based on news paranoia, 1/2 Hour is more than just the use of satire as another legitimate system of thought...
...The 1/2 Hour News Hour is not based on current events...
...We report...
...On T V, as we have seen for a decade on NBC, it dies not only on Saturdays but the rest of the week too...
...His launching a satirical news show two years in advance of the next Administration’s arrival is seen as allowing sufficient time to sharpen both edges of the rapier...
...Forget the war against terror...
...Not to be forgotten was the issue of her child’s father...
...The President was Rush Limbaugh, outlining his First 100 Days program, which included, if I’m not mistaken, free prescription drugs...
...Forget North Korea trying to build a nuclear bomb...
...Buchwald denied the charge, saying he wrote “only adulterated rot...
...We spent a whole week fighting over Anna Nicole’s body...
...It also has the unfair advantage of a sitting duck, I mean President, and a goofy Administration...
...It’s always picking on conservatives...
...Still, the laugh track enjoyed the first show, so who am I to complain...
...Traditionally, it dies on Saturday night in the theater...
...passed over for a consensus candidate like the Thin Man, who was moonlighting from keeping us in stitches on radio...
...Paranoiameister Surnow and his team don’t seem to get what they are satirizing...
...When he told them to “stop that!“ they put Anna on top and his picture underneath...
...Stewart’s best humor is based on taking out of context video clips (technically called a contextectomy) of all the bizarre things that seem to happen in the news...
...He has the most expressive face in TV journalism since David Brinkley raised his eyebrows on the Huntley-Brinkley Report...
...Anna Nicole dies and it is the most important thing in the world...
...Using the standard TV satire program’s mix of fake news, interrupted by fake commercials, 1/2 Hour rounds up the usual suspects—Hillary, Obama, the ACLU, political correctness, Hollywood celebrities with hearts as big as all outdoors looking for a cause, and the other miscreants who star as targets in FNC’s prime time Punch-andJudy shows...
...It has even been making a mockery out of Fox News itself...
...The Daily Show, whose motto is “the most trusted name in fake news,” has been making Swiss cheese out of the Bush Administration’s leaders, policies, issues, and wars for six years with its nightly barrage of barbs...
...Yo u decide...
...To be fair, you can’t tell how bad the show is going to be until they start having to be satirical every week...
...The value of satire as an effective tool for political and social change is sometimes overestimated...
...Today the pros laugh it off or, better yet, ignore it...
...The 1/2 Hour News Hour is an effort to level the playing field by doing the same to liberals, their icons, policies, issues, and gaffes in an unfair and unbalanced way—while giving us all, regardless of race, creed or political servitude, a good laugh...
...Besides, that was back in the 1970s...
...The 1/2 Hour News Hour is—let me check my notes here—a 30-minute show that the network flacks describe as “a satirical reflection of news issues and current events...
...Nice Guy, Fox is saying...
...That was hysterical...
...I’m sure Stewart’s sting will be felt by whoever wins the 2008 election...
...That must have been some seriously deadlocked Republican convention I missed, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney, et al...
...Then they had Anna’s head on Wolf’s body, and his head on Anna’s body...
...The night of February 26, Keith Olbermann conducted an experiment on his rival MSNBC show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann...
...No more Mr...
...Even more alarming was the Vice President, Ann Coulter...
...Not only is The Daily Show twice as long, it is several thousand times funnier...
...But there is a puzzling aspect to The 1/2 Hour News Hours plunging into the fake news war...
Vol. 90 • March 2007 • No. 2
