Fox & Friends: The Nero News Network’s Morning Mess
I used to get my cars serviced at a place where the waiting room television was (and I gather, still is) set 24/7 to Fox News. And since I would arrive at the shop early to leave early, I might have had to endure up to 2 hours of Fixed-Noise’s hostility-inducing, lame-excuse for a news and information show, Fox & Friends.
To all that have yet to bear witness to this slow-motion train wreck of a basic cable talk-show, let me draw on your indellible adolescent sense-memories:
Fox & Friends is like the kept-back-in-seventh-grade (two years) bully that pounced, gave you a knuckle-shampoo, and then adding insult to injury, ripped the Game Boy from your trembling hands.
The three-headed monster that is Fox & Friends consists of Brian Kilmeade, playing the tired, sweaty, perpetually-angry middle-aged stuck in middle-management white guy. With the day’s New York Post late-edition folded lengthwise and neatly under the arm, he always gets the last available (middle) seat aboard the 5:02 Long Island Railroad train home to Massapequa, the 20-inch wide space separating two other flop-sweating adonises.
And Steve Doocy as the obnoxious Class Cut-Up. Of course, you remember Steve-O: he, the attention-craving middle-child who straw-shot tin foil spitballs at you from the back of the chemistry lab, all the while mumbling snarky remarks about the virility of the high school yearbook editor, into the ear of this person:
The alpha-female, pom-pon squad captain, BMW Z3 roadster-driving, high school quarterback-sexually-frustrating, perennial mean-girl, played with method-acting perfection by Gretchen Carlson.
Excuse me while I take a deep, cleansing breath. (Serenity Now…Serenity Now…) Ah, that’s better.
For the entirety of this sophomoric show’s run, which makes a semester’s worth of televised high school announcement programs seem like a box-set of the best of The News Hour With Jim Lehrer, the production value of Fox & Friends can be summed up this way:
Take the narrow BushCo. adoring “my way or the highway” ideologic thread running through the entirety of the Fox News program line-up; staff it with C-lister “talent”, one of which is (sorry I have to do this to you, Doocy) vaguely recalled more for shamelessly-shmaltzy mid-1980’s-vintage WRC-TV Live at Five ”remotes” (made-up example: a cabbage and cauliflower-juggling circus clown entertaining afternoon-nap-deprived four year-olds and their Tyson’s Corner Center-shopping yuppie parents) than for an utter inability to reliably forecast a single bright and sunny (chance of precipitation = ZERO) Washington DC day; and infuse it with the ferocity of a pack of testosterone-driven adolescent ”hyenas” encircling the new kid in P.E. - the terrified, undersized 7th grader suffering through his first naked boy’s locker room experience - like a quivering baby impala separated from the troop…
Need another cleaning breath…AH!
So, this past week, it was quite the Must-See TV Experience when the shiny Roger Ailes-sprayed veneer on Fox & Friends, cracked.
Watch here for what happened when co-host Brian Kilmeade, expressed his opinion that Fox & Family’’s de regeur Barack Obama-bashing had gone a bridge too far:
Nice huh? Well, the drama didn’t end there.
In a late-segment on the show, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace pops up on camera. Irma La Doocy starts in with some trademark snark, but watch as the Doocian meteorological conditions turn stormy:
Then, Wallace goes on Kilmeade’s radio show…
Could this be like Nero’s reign of the Holy (Fox) empire?
Doocy, why don’t you rosin your bow and play us a little “Orange Blossom Special” - or “Stormy Weather” - on your fiddle?
Filed under: National Media, National Politics
