Friday night’s live broadcast from Washington D.C. of the season premier of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” featured a take down of the hosts’ attack on Fox News from comedian Jerry Seinfeld and Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS) that had even rival MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell recoiling at Maher’s insistence that Fox News was responsible for the polarization of America.
Maher began by discussing the real polarization being between rural and urban America but then not realizing the contraction of blaming regional differences of a country on a cable news network created in 1996, he began to insist Fox News has created a “language barrier.”
Barbour countered by saying Fox News didn’t create the polarization — it was a response to it. Because Barbour explained there used to be a monopoly of three networks with liberal views that had “the same message, the same way. Fox News was the first thing to come along that gave a conservative point of view.”
Jerry Seinfeld jumped in saying “each side just talks to its side,” so it’s silly single out Fox News, adding “to blame it all on Fox news doesn’t seem completely fair.”
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