FOX News ... Still Unfunny

From My Wordpress Blog (yes, I have two of them)
The Facist News Channel has a new show (if you want to call it that) called the The Half Hour News Hour (...yeah, I know). That is supposed to deliver a "Daily Show for Conservatives" slant on the days news stories. Here is my Review of Rupert Murdoch's latest snafu.

The strangest thing about the Half Hour News Hour, the Fox News Channel’s first attempt at intentional satire, described by its creator Joel Surnow as “the Daily Show for conservatives,” is not the fact that it has been panned by what Fox calls “the liberal media”.

And panned it certainly was. “Radiation sickness is funnier” raved Charlie Brooker in the Guardian. “The audience for this show is someone who doesn’t like comedy. It is stupendously not funny” chortled Lisa de Moraes on Washingtonpost.com. No, what’s unusual is that the right’s antidote to the Daily Show appears to have been made by people who’ve never actually watched the Daily Show.

While there does seem to be some confusion in the upper echelons of Fox News over just how the Daily Show’s satire works - last August Geraldo Rivera told Bill O’Reilly that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert “make a living putting on video of old ladies slipping on ice, and people laughing” - you would think that Surnow, the conservative producer of 24, would have more insight into what makes the Daily Show so successful. But instead of following the format of one of the most popular shows in America, Surnow has chosen to imitate a very different kind of spoof news program, namely Saturday Night Live’s long-running, and long unfunny, “Weekend Update.” American viewers of the first episode of The Half Hour (which, mercifully, is only 22 minutes minus the commercials) will instantly recognise, in both the opening sketch, imagining Rush Limbaugh as president, and a representative fake news report, linking Barack Obama to Marion Barry, the formula for this kind of broad satire.

So what is the Half Hour missing? Actual news footage. While every episode of the Daily Show relies heavily on clips of real recent events, gleaned from the airwaves and edited in such a way as to give the nation’s political leaders and journalists enough tape to hang themselves, The Half Hour, following the stale Weekend Update formula, is entirely devoid of real news and depends, instead, on invented fictional narratives, mocking real people by pretending that absurd stories about them are true. So while the Daily Show frequently produces sardonic but accurate reports on real-world events, like this one on the Bush administration’s actual attempts to explain away the National Security Agency program to listen in on Americans’ phone calls, the Half Hour News Hour simply pretends that caricatures of the American left are real, and presents fake reports like this one: “Dispelling reports that she would staff her White House with longtime cronies and political appointees, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton vowed that if she becomes president, she will surround herself with a diverse, multi-ethnic, multi-generational group … of angry lesbians.”

By the way, if you hear an echo, in this sort of gag, of the kind of mockery of Democrats that Republican political operatives include in their attack ads during political campaigns, that may be no coincidence. Surnow has created the Half Hour for a news channel owned by Rupert Murdoch and run by Roger Ailes, a former political operative who helped elect Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush president by managing their ad campaigns. Watching the Half Hour’s first episode, which reports on a parallel universe in which there is nothing funny about Republicans and the main subjects to be mocked are Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, global warming and hybrid cars, its not hard to see the whole production as negative political advertising by other means. The report on Obama, for instance, reminds viewers that he has admitted using cocaine as a teenager, uses that as an excuse to connect him to the disgraced, African-American, former mayor of Washington DC who was filmed by the FBI smoking crack, makes another joke about the fact that his middle name is Hussein and then pretends that footage of exuberant crowds of Kenyans greeting Obama in Africa is of “the American people” who support him. Rather than any real attempt at entertainment, this all might be better understood as a 21st century version of the infamous, race-baiting “Willie Horton ad” that was produced in support of George HW Bush’s presidential campaign in 1988 by a former employee of Bush senior’s media advisor, Roger Ailes.

While the Daily Show is not entirely reality-based, and does occasionally use fake voice-overs and fictional exaggerations in its comedy, one of the main reasons it is so popular is that it can be - and is - used as an alternative way of keeping up on the real news. While viewers of Fox’s Half Hour are only being educated on developments in the world invented for the show, the Daily Show’s fans are served a steady diet of clips of politicians and celebrities culled from the news channels and presented, with annotation, in all their actual inadvertent hilarity. Perhaps the best example of this method was the awe-inspiring, Stephen Colbert-narrated campaign film in apparent support of Bush’s election in 2004, which used Bush’s actual words to make his whole presidency seem like a farce.

Another important difference between the mission of the Daily Show and that of the Half Hour is that the Fox program, which actually airs on a cable news channel, makes no attempt at all to satirize the news media. As David Weigel has noted on Reason Magazine’s blog, “The point of the Daily Show … was never to provide a liberal take on the news. It was to make fun of the news.” Despite what conservatives like Ailes and Surnow seem to believe, the Daily Show exists mainly - like Chris Morris’ brilliant, subversive Brass Eye - to satirize the commercial news media. So, when the media is obsessed with non-political events, like the death of Anna Nicole Smith, Jon Stewart introduces compilations of clips, like this one, that skewer the television news channels for their absurd overreaction.

But the Daily Show is really at its best when its two targets come together in one story: when the news media unthinkingly reports political stories that are in fact fake narratives scripted by political operatives. Take, for instance, this compilation of clips on the fake story, pushed by Fox News, that Barack Obama went to a radical madrassa, or one from 2004, laying out for posterity just how the cable news channels facilitate the disingenuous dissemination of political talking points by political operatives who appear on television and pretend to answer reporters questions spontaneously, when they are, in fact, simply repeating pre-scripted remarks written for them by the campaign they are serving (a transcript of that report, identifying the speakers and the cable channels they appeared on, is here). This is the kind of public service news satire the Half Hour News Hour will not be providing America.