My staff of thousands thinks this paragraph by Barrett Brown should be inserted like an unsheathed stallion’s penis into every last one of the obituaries plaguing us about the late Roger Ailes . . . just in case the corpse hasn’t been properly mounted:
I don’t really mind Fox on ideological grounds, as a nation with this many prisons and military bases clearly merits at least one openly fascist news network, but I do object to the shamelessness with which it insists on coarsening the culture. For half a century, there was an unspoken agreement among the nation’s broadcasters to refrain from giving public affairs programs to anyone with a significant amount of Irish blood. But when Fox News went on the air, it was immediately obvious that the executives had canvassed every riverfront bar in Hoboken in search of the loudest, most obnoxious Irish street brawlers they could find who were not already employed as cops, cleaned them up a bit, and given them prime-time weekdays slots and full creative control. As with so many other bad production habits, MSNBC and CNN felt the need to follow in News Corp’s footsteps, and now half the time you turn on the news, there’s some burly Gaelic bastard shouting out warnings about the fairy folk who steal naughty children before inexplicably collapsing into tears, followed by 15 minutes of drunken song and a demand for additional Benghazi hearings. Certainly this makes for good television; I’m just calling for some decency.
It’s good to see O’Reilly, Hannity, Beck and their “angry white male” cousins like Limbaugh get a taste of their own medicine, especially since the ironic intent (and clear effect) of Brown’s comment is anti-chauvinist. Even the comments about the coarsening of culture and loss of decency are ironic. Our major television networks and even NPR and PBS repeat with the highest dignity our government’s murderous lies — decency indeed. The subtle dimensions of Brown’s writing moves it beyond journalism to art. If he can keep his life together, he could follow in the steps of other great journalists become writers like Twain and Hemingway…