The Show to Watch

Fox's fake news blunder

There is one show on television that can no longer go ignored.

As even the most tepid observer of media can attest, the advent of 24 hour news networks has in no way contributed to a more informed public or a greater depth of intellectual discourse. What CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News have bestowed upon the American public, however, is a sort of arms race in the blending of current events, politics, and entertainment.

Examples of this are Legion, but Fox News in particular has recently taken a bold step forward on the frontier of infotainment with its show The Half-Hour News Hour. The show is an audacious leap not because it is a snarky, comedic fake news show but because it is a snarky, comedic fake news show on a purportedly real news network.

The show features two anchors, male and female, making back and forth jibes reminiscent of certain incarnations of Saturday Night Live’s regular skit “Weekend Update.” In addition, the show features sketch segments with actors playing correspondents much like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

In fact, The Half-Hour News Hour, one of the most aggressively unfunny spectacles you will ever witness, reads almost like a psychological case study of a Fox News inferiority complex directed specifically at Jon Stewart and his ground-breaking show on Comedy Central. The Fox News show parrots the type of irreverent political comedy that The Daily Show seems to have monopolized, only with an unabashedly conservative bent and lack of humor so glaring, it’s like watching your grandmother get a colonoscopy.

The fundamental bias of Fox News is already knowledge so common that it has become dated in the way that Clay Aiken and Monica Lewinsky have managed. Here, however, we have a self-proclaimed “fake news show” intentionally providing a heavy editorial slant with no need for the writers or producers to even pretend that they care about anything except shilling conservative talking points. Thus you find segments like “The Evolving Male,” which features an actor playing a spineless, overly sensitive father who won’t discipline his son, proclaiming, “It’s not my job to make rules and regulations, that’s the government’s job.” Or if that’s not enough, a feature story about compact florescent light bulbs that use 80% less energy yet might give you brain cancer because they contain small amounts of mercury (the “joke” featured a correspondent being cleaned by a Haz-mat team after accidentally dropping one of the bulbs; as if no other household product exists that contains mercury, enough to gauge the rise and fall of temperature perhaps).

Better still, if none of that has you in tears, than perhaps an unnecessarily long rant by Dennis Miller about why global warming is both annoying and nothing to worry about will do the trick. That a Fox News audience likely has no clue what the fuck Miller is talking about when he spouts his signature arcane references is not nearly as troublesome as the fact that these days Miller sounds stupider every time he opens his mouth. Once a veteran of fake news on “Weekend Update,” appearing in such irredeemable garbage as The Half-Hour News Hour represents yet another sign of Miller’s imploding career (as if Monday Night Football and Tales from the Crypt: Bordello of Blood weren’t vivid enough harbingers).

Pinpointing why The Half-Hour fails so spectacularly is as simple as figuring out why The Daily Show has broken from the shackles of cable television to ascend to the pinnacle of modern comedy television. The Daily Show is not good because it has a decidedly liberal worldview (although, too often these days the word “liberal” is substituted for “common sense”), but rather because it is smart, incisive and, at times, unbearably hilarious.

For example, where The Half-Hour uses actors to portray stereotypes it wishes to ridicule (as with the wussy, liberal father of “The Evolving Male” segment), The Daily Show simply allows the absurdity of our own skewed reality to create humor for it. It juxtaposes video clips of Bush administration officials blatantly contradicting themselves. It sets a camera in front of a homophobe running for public office and simply lets him talk. And if it can milk no humor from a given story, it simply goes for a good old-fashioned dick joke with a zeal that makes the high school sophomore in all of us proud.

The Half-Hour News Hour, on the other hand, epitomizes why people with strong conservative politics have a hard time being funny. Funny comes from chaos. Comedy wages a never-ending insurgency against all forces of decorum and perceived propriety. Humor is a rebel against the status quo. I pity the writers of The Half-Hour because it must be beyond difficult to try to write jokes about why the catastrophe following Hurricane Katrina was in no way the Bush administration’s fault (seriously, give this a shot—it’s the mental equivalent of trying to defecate a refrigerator). In this sense, the show reminds me of a cruel, disliked teacher trying to suddenly win her students over with knock-knock jokes: All the kids can do is cringe and look at their classmates with eyes that say, I can’t wait to make fun of this bitch during lunch.

Yet I told you this was a show that cannot go ignored, and I stand by that. First of all, you must watch The Half-Hour News Hour at least once, if for no other reason than to marvel at just how breathtakingly awful it is. Perhaps you will only last through one episode, perhaps only through the first ten minutes of one episode, but following those ten minutes, the very next thing you hear that is actually funny might just send you into a fit of hysterical, joyful weeping.

Second and more importantly, as a study of media and politics, the The Half-Hour News Hour is nothing short of fascinating. With it, a news network has self-admittedly crippled any claim of objectivity it previously held (no matter how weak). Does this pave the way for the rise of other networks with completely unconcealed agendas? Could this one abysmal program playing for only a half hour on Sunday nights actually beget the rise of entire “news” networks that represent party or ideology above accuracy?

Back in the Nineteenth century political parties used to publish their own newspapers with the intention of shading the day’s news with that party’s own perspective. How difficult would it be to envision this approach tacked on to a different, more widely disseminated medium—perhaps with a flagship comedy show satirizing all that which the party deems ridiculous? Unfortunately, the implications of The Half-Hour News Hour go well beyond jokes.

But then again, if it keeps Dennis Miller from performing stand-up at an Applebee's as his next job, at least the show has served a purpose.