In news that’s sure to make liberals’ heads explode, Fox News has now sat atop the cable-news ratings for one hundred consecutive months. From Fishbowl DC:
The gang at FNC has to be pleased. The network rolls in at #1 for 100 consecutive months in total viewership, according to Nielsen Media Research. This includes Primetime and Total Day news programming.
FNC also secured nine out of the top 10 programs in cable news for April in total viewers. Here’s the pecking order of the top five:
- Bill O’Reilly
- Glenn Beck
- Sean Hannity
- Bret Baier
- Greta Van Susteren
As if on cue, liberals’ heads exploded. Here’s one now:
I am mad as heck, and I’m not going to take it any more. There is evil abroad in our land, and I intend to call it out and name names.
This evil is not the Democrats or the Republicans. It is not the liberals or the conservatives.
This evil is Fox News (perhaps the greatest misnomer in U.S. history), created by Rupert Murdoch, and abetted by such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Anne Coulter, and as putrid a pile of guano as ever existed.
Fox News is the greatest threat to domestic tranquility this country has seen in many decades.
This poor fellow is named Allen Dennis, a retired history professor, writing in the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser. It seems he’s all wee-wee’d up:
On a daily basis, it spews forth fear, suspicion, resentment, lies, paranoia, distortion, misrepresentation, bigotry and false witness. Worse yet, it incites these emotions among good and decent Americans who will believe almost anything if it is on Fox News.
There is no “news” on Fox. It is commentary with a malicious twist designed to appeal to the basest human emotions.
In a way, it is like professional wrestling. Everyone knows it’s fake, but some people will believe it anyway.
No concerned citizen’s anguish would be complete without a gratuitous invocation of Hitler, and sure enough, Dennis delivers:
Adolf Hitler perfected the art of the “big lie.” If you tell the big lie repeatedly and play on the natural paranoia of the public, you can get them to believe almost anything.
In Hitler’s case, the big lie was that the Jews caused all that was wrong in Germany and Europe and had to be exterminated. Many good and decent Germans fell victim to this big lie and did little or nothing as more than 6 million Jews fell victim to Hitler’s crematoria, gas chambers and concentration camps.
When it comes to telling the big lie, the rabid Foxes have refined the model. Hitler had one big lie. Fox News has the big lie of the day.
It sure looks bad for the good ol’ U.S.A.: Dennis also links Fox to the “birthers” and those who think Obama is the anti-Christ (“Barack Obama knows more about the New Testament than the entire den of rabid foxes”). He’s infuriated at any suggestion that Obama is a socialist (“Technically, socialism is anything funded by taxpayer money, administered and regulated by government at any level (national, state or local), and available for the good of all who inhabit that particular governmental unit”) and becomes positively enraged at the notion that Obama could be considered a Marxist(“The next lie is that Obama is a Marxist. The goons at Fox News could not explain Marxism if their lives depended on it. To wail about Marxism in the United States is exponential insanity and demagoguery at its sickest”).
Well, that certainly shows Roger Ailes who’s boss. The retired history professor concludes his temper tantrum with one of the hoariest cliches in the book. Yep, this one:
They boast of patriotism, but to dress their venom in the sacred robe of patriotism is the kind of patriotism derided by Dr. Samuel Johnson in 1775 as “the last refuge of scoundrels.”
Over to you for comment, correction, observation and general merriment.
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