The Fox News Effect

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The FOX News EffectOn Monday, September 12, at 5 o’clock, Fox News’s rating was increased by one. My first reaction: where the hell is Glenn Beck? I was actually looking forward to seeing this journalist who I had been hearing was out there where the buses don’t run. But he was gone.

It was widely reported that Beck was fired by Roger Ailes for being too extreme, or what we progressives commonly call “all that right-wing crap.” All that right-wing crap has been replaced by a news show called The Five, which consists of five people sitting around a table talking simultaneously. What the Fab Five was talking about, I was to discover as the week wore on, were the highlights of the right-wing crap:

There is a liberal mob in control of the Senate and the White House trying to force things down our throats, like jobs.

The Republicans have been prevented from fixing the nojobsjobsjobs situation by the Democrats, who appeared to have invented over-regulation and over-taxation. Furthermore, the president’s jobsjobsjobs bill is appalling.

They discussed Michele Bachman’s stategy in the coming GOP debate on CNN, and shrewdly concluded that most viewers would be watching Monday Night Football.

I think that’s what they were saying. With five people all yelling at the same time, it was hard to understand them. Five newspeople all arguing might not work as communication, but it is the closest I’ve seen to a real libertarian news show.

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