Friday Fox Follies – All Joking Aside

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Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:23 pm

Just like every week, this Friday Fox Follies is compiled with Fox & Friends on in the background for comic relief. Today’s comic relief? Relieving Trump of blame after his cruel and unusual comedy stylings at last night’s Alfred Smith Catholic charity dinner. Steve Doocy explained away the unprecedented booing. The audience simply didn’t understand. The genesis of the joke was found in a WikiLeaks release and the mainstream media didn’t cover that (Doocy lied), therefore “No one in that room knew about it.”

Admitting the dinner was $3,000 a plate, or $150,000 a table, Doocy pretended these Republican fat cats (for the most part) were “New York elites” in a “Democratic stronghold”. Naturally they booed, right?

Watch Doocy turn himself into a joke:

Watch for yourself and decide whether they’re booing or yelling, “BRUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCE!!!”

Are you laughing yet?

THIS IS NO JOKE: Isn’t this convenient? A Trump conspiracy theory, that Fox “News” is running with, came from the already discredited James O’Keefe’s Verizon Project (that’s the name, right?). Now we learn O’Keefe was funded (in part) by the Trump Foundation, even tho’ O’Keefe admits he slices and dices video to tell the deceptive story he wants told.

The dictionary definition of a closed loop system.

THE LAST DEBATE: Fox “News” was popping its buttons that the mendacious channel was finally hosting a presidential debate. Naturally they thought Wallace did a great job, even though he let Trump spout lies refuted on his own show, and he peppered his questions with Fox “News” lies. No matter. Trump still said Wallace rigged the debate, Think Progress didn’t think the questions were ‘fair and balanced’, and Media Matters was especially critical of Wallace:

Fox’s Chris Wallace Pushes Candidates To
Accept GOP Budget Priorities During Debate

Chris Wallace Botched The Discussion Of
Immigration At The Final Presidential Debate

Chris Wallace Let Trump Push The Right-
Wing Media Myth Of “Partial-Birth” Abortion

Chris Wallace And The Banality Of Conservative Dishonesty

Wallace’s rave reviews from Republicans and Democrats alike highlight the extent to which right-wing dishonesty — made ubiquitous by Fox News and conservative media — has become normal in national politics. Wallace’s network has spent years repeating and mainstreaming these types of lies — the stimulus failed, Democrats want open borders, et cetera. Viewers have heard them so often that it can feel passé to go through the motions of debunking them over and over. Journalists become so numb to the talking points that they can hear them being repeated by a debate moderator during a presidential debate without batting an eye.

That’s how political propaganda works — not by outright convincing people, but by treating a lie as so routine and unremarkable that people slowly stop being suspicious of it.

Journalists’ willingness to accept and overlook Wallace’s b*llsh*t is even greater when it’s being compared to the absurdity of Donald Trump. When Trump is on stage claiming his opponent should be disqualified from running for office or suggesting he might not accept the results of the election, it feels nitpicky to worry about the misleading nature of many of Wallace’s questions. Trump’s unhinged, out-of-control campaign style makes everything around him seem normal and tame by comparison. We’re willing to forgive Wallace’s occasional dishonesty because we’re so grateful that he pointed out Trump is literally threatening a core democratic principle.

Meanwhile, it’s the Nixon-Kennedy debates all over again:

Fox Pundits Suggest A Camera And Lighting Conspiracy
Made Clinton Look Better Than Trump At The Debate

Laughing yet?

A SHEPARD SHALL LEAD THEM: The buried lede in a HuffPo article called Is Shep Smith The Future Of Fox News? was that Shepard Smith Officially Comes Out and said, “Roger Ailes Didn’t Care That I’m Gay.” Not that I care either, but I had assumed he was already out.

HuffPo proves Smith is an outlier in other ways as well:

For Shep, the gulf between the news side and his more outspoken colleagues is immeasurable. “When the opinion people say things and then later we get facts that are different, and I report those, everybody would love for there to be a war going on here,” he said. “But it’s not like that. Everybody’s got a job to do. [Sean] Hannity is trying to get conservatives elected. And he wants you to listen to him and believe what he believes. And I’m disseminating facts. It’s really apples and teaspoons. What we do is so different. He’s an entertaining guy who has an audience that he serves, and I deliver the news. His is probably easier ― he knows what he thinks and just sticks with it. This stuff changes all the time.”

[…] “Every day we want to be absolutely fair and absolutely balanced. That phrase has not been bastardized for me,” he said. “Fair and balanced means I have to provide two sides to the story of ‘we won’t allow a religion in the country.’ There’s no balance to that. That’s just against everything that the nation was founded on.”

Last week, Shep dubbed Trump “almost fascist.” I asked Shep why he added the qualifier. “Eh, that takes the edge off it, because you don’t want to offend people. But it was Mussolini who jailed the opposition and that’s never happened in American history,” he said, adding that his team searched exhaustively through history for any other example of a candidate threatening to jail a major-party opponent and came up empty.

“It sort of is almost fascism defined,” Shep said. “I don’t like putting labels on things, and sometimes it’s just so obvious that it just comes out. I hope he was joking about that. In America, we don’t torture, and we don’t jail our political opponents.” (Getting away from major-party candidates, President Woodrow Wilson did actually jail Socialist Party nominee Eugene Debs, who won 1 million votes from prison in 1920 and was pardoned by the winner, Warren G. Harding.)

And that’s why we love Shep.

JUST IN TIME FOR HALLOWEEN:

Horror film producer to create mini-series
about disgraced former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes

That is not a joke. Nor is blaming the victim funny as Fox News Takes Swipe at Andrea Tantaros, Says She Wants Public Lawsuit to ‘Hawk Her Book’.

This is funny tho’:

Bad Blood? Donald Trump and Roger
Ailes Reportedly No Longer Speak

Meanwhile, Can Fox News survive the forces it unleashed on the 2016 election? This as a new POLL [says]: Republicans Falling Out of Love with Fox News:

What is causing the Fox brand to fall? A mixture of things, I’d imagine.

1). Ailes scandal.
2). News personalities leaving the network.
3). People who think they boost Trump too much.
4). People who think they are totally against Trump.

I mean, 3 and 4 alone are probably a big chunk of their audience anyway. It’s not that they’re losing viewers so much as people just don’t respect them. It also seems to be media-wide, but the substantial fall of Fox News is important. Elections have consequences, and this appears to be one of them. Fox has not covered itself in glory at all this year.

Which is Why Now Is the Perfect Time for Trump TV to Take Down Fox News, unless, as Wash Post [says]: Breitbart News, InfoWars Are “Ready To Claim” The GOP’s Future.

KILLING TRUTH: It’s tough to get called a liar mid-promo tour. Serial fabulist Bill O’Reilly — who lied about sexual harassment charges against him, claimed he was in a war zone he wasn’t, and helped push Trump’s voter fraud canard — has been pimping the NatGeo docudrama/sitcom based on his Killing Reagan book. Many inaccuracies in Killing Reagan were discovered previously by people smarter than The Falafel King. Eric Wemple exposes a new fictitious and florid passage. Rather than paraphrasing, or extensive quoting, read:

‘Killing Reagan’ places Sam Donaldson in
a fictional confrontation with the president

Reagan video proves Bill O’Reilly’s historical fraud

Papa Bear also dropped in on Stephen Colbert [who] exposes cowardice of Fox News host Bill O’Reilly:

Two signs of the upcoming Apocalypse: 1). Barack Obama and Bill O’Reilly [agree &] Tell Donald Trump to Stop Whining; and Even Bill O’Reilly Sounds Like He’s Giving Up On Donald Trump.

Now that’s funny.

Headly Westerfield is a student of comedy, having once worked as a “joke plugger” for comedians willing to pay for piece work.