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The Big Whine of the Week®
The Big Whine of the Week® for June 6, 2022, had to be over the decision that Fox News Channel would not cover the House’s dog-and-pony show on Thursday night. Not only did FNC not carry it, they evidently took it a bridge too far. Writes Jonah Goldberg in his G-File:
What I hadn’t anticipated, however, was the possibility that Tucker Carlson believes the January 6 committee really is a big deal and that he was scared of just how newsworthy it might be—particularly to his own audience.
How else can you explain the fact that his show ran for the whole hour without commercial interruption? (Goldberg’s emphasis)
Here we learn some things even I had not anticipated, namely that white people don’t know how to use a television remote, and the few that do must have some neural stimulation to do so. Those three frames of black at the end of a segment – that 1/10th of one second of nothingness – is the only thing that allows white people the capacity to hit the arrow up or arrow down on their remotes. I guess we all seem to be crippled in some way. Black people can’t get government IDs and white people can’t change channels. Who’d a thunk it?
I have long been mystified by the power that otherwise bright and rational people attribute to Fox News and how it has become an obsession with them. FNC pulls in around 2.6M viewers in primetime on any given weeknight and that’s enough to be the leader of a fractured TV landscape. But in the greater scheme of things, it’s nothing.
We are told that 159M people cast votes for president in 2020. That means that FNC is reaching less than 2% of them. But somehow that 2% is the only thing standing between the United States thriving and crumbling to dust.
Politicians and pundits alike are nostalgic for the days of Watergate, when 75% of Americans reported that they had seen at least some of the hearings live. But in 1973-74 what the hell else was on? Cable TV was in its infancy. HBO was still a regional network. ESPN wouldn’t come around until the end of the decade.
But today is different. Baseball and the NHL didn’t shut down Thursday night. Cable networks ran other sports and scads of off-network reruns. I think six of them were all running NCIS marathons. Netflix didn’t shut down all its offerings and replace it with J6: The Musical. Unless they were going to recreate the riot live, this thing was never going to do what they wanted it to do. (And even then it wouldn’t have been the same without the original cast.)
And so the Left whines, “They didn’t watch. Fox executives wouldn’t let them.”
That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of it works. And that is what upsets the whiners the most. Under the current setup, the American people just have too many damn choices, particularly the choice not to pay attention to the whiners. The whiners want their 1984 moment. The whiners long for the single channel screen that can never be turned off and can never be changed. The whiners need you to participate in their Two Minutes of Hate.
Screw the whiners.
Published in General
Yeah, They’re pissed that They no longer have Their Walter Cronkite, so They have to create a “disinformation governance board.”
This is literally the point. It was on all three channels, every day. Worst kid TV summer in history.
If the Demos don’t take the business seriously, I’m not going to, either.
Is he saying they voted for him for Speaker of the House?
I don’t know. It didn’t sound like it was worth the trouble of finding out.
Who cares what Jonah thinks about anything?
When one makes an observation it helps to, you know, include some actual observations. I could have just as easily cited Jim Acosta of CNN. But even fewer care about him.
Symp’ing for commies is horrible way to make a living.
Indeed.
But it pays for Jonah’s fine cigars and liquor.
Some of us flyover country knuckle-draggers don’t even watch FOX News LIVE!, if we watch it at all. Tucker didn’t run commercials? How would we have known? How did Jonah find out?
The Left and, apparently, its useful idiots won’t be satisfied until the only “choice” anyone has left is the choice to kill their offspring. Power-mad, control freak bastards. Screw ’em.
I don’t read the G-File. Is this a quote from Jonah Goldberg or a comment on his writing?
Jonah’s conclusion is that Tucker Carlson is scared of the newsworthiness of that show trial?
That is such a playground taunt. What are yeh’ chicken!? BWAK! BWAK! BWAK!
Pretty sure the decision to not show resistance porn was not Tucker’s. Jonah must think that Tucker controls all programming at Fox.
Jonah Goldberg has completed his transition into Brian Stelter.
I should have added that across the board only 20M tuned in to begin with. That would only represent one fourth of Biden voters and is a pretty good indication that very few people who haven’t already made up their mind on the seriousness of the J6 events were watching.
Some commentators on Twitter were actually impressed by the 20M number. But then you would have to think of it as being in the same realm as any other entertainment offering. As compelling news coverage, not so much. Nielsen has tried, and admitted in failing, to put a number of viewers on 9/11. They settled on a number of 80+M but concede it was probably much, much higher.
The “big reveal” was supposedly that several GOP congressmen had sought pardons from Trump in the waning days for their alleged conspiratorial actions before and on January 6th. But, as usual in all things Trump, there were accusations but no evidence offered. This was Liz Cheney’s big solo on stage and she couldn’t get hit the high notes. This was her chance to nail the “insurrectionists” to the wall and turn the tide in her own re-election race and she didn’t do it.
The same media that notoriously despised her father now worship her existence. Of course, even she knows that once her usefulness is exhausted she will be dumped but I think her hope is that she can keep her Northern Virginia residence after her upcoming defeat and relaunch her political career from there.
The establishment GOP has rallied. Since January of 2021, Cheney has received 11,900 individual donations. 296 of those have come from inside the state of Wyoming. She isn’t going to use much of that money on herself. More than likely she will convert her campaign organization into a PAC and use that money to seek her revenge.
Jonah still sends emails?
This is exactly what the whiners want, and good for Fox News for depriving them of it, kind of. Fox did air the hearings on the business channel. There’s a strong anti-Trump faction in Fox, in ownership and the board room, and among certain key on-air talent.
So there was Fox Business carrying the stacked, one-sided House committee hearings. Okay, I get it, giving the other side some airtime is the Fair and Balanced thing to do. Fox News often counterprograms itself with Fox Business, with the latter usually the more right of center and inclusive of libertarians. Flipping the hearing to the less widely distributed Fox Business got the news priorities right.
On the other hand, why even carry a rigged hearing about an ineffectual response to a rigged election? Is the Left’s narrative is so weak it can only survive when unquestioned? Consensus roadblock programming, whether it’s for approved charity fundraisers, political conventions or self-congratulatory awards shows desperate to aggregate an audience, always strikes me 1984ish. Cross-ownership of multiple outlets (e.g. by Comcast) facilitates groupthink. As the Left’s exclusionary thinking dominating most media companies, sports leagues, big tech, and many corporate boards, how do we fight back beyond just the annual visit to the ballot box?
Authoritarians love their own manufactured versions of consensus, from the BLM-branding and casting mandates of the prolonged George Floyd moment, through the universal, AP-fostered usage of the word “false” in all media references to President Trump’s assertions about 2020 election irregularities. Jonah G? A once-amusing, now bitter and inconsequential whiner who falsely believes he deserves airtime more than Tucker Carlson. The greater danger: the designs of those much higher up on the media food chain.
It’s really astounding to see all the news channels reacting with hysteria to Fox News. And I’m not even a viewer of Fox News and I don’t think it’s particularly conservative (not when they’re celebrating children who transition). But the hysterical attacks on Fox News from the left frequently forces me to defend it. (Dangit, that’s how they got me voting for Trump, too: the dishonest attacks.)
What we see here from CNN, et al, is just plain old jealousy. Why does Fox News have more viewers than we do!?
Instead of looking hard at that question and considering changing in order to bring in new viewers, they seek to destroy Fox News.
Jealously, vindictiveness, obsession — it’s all there.
If it weren’t for the politics of envy, the Left would be apolitical.
In a totalitarian regime, the same Message is spoken from every possible outlet and institution: news, entertainment, academia, . . . the window of the greengrocer’s shop. That one outlet isn’t repeating the Message is a grievous sin and marks them as an enemy of the State.
Would that more outlets and institutions become enemies of the State.
For comparison:
He has done everything he can to chase me away. It’s astounding how irrelevant he has become.
It’s also projection. They don’t let in any information that might derail their narratives and beliefs, and they think others are the same. Hence they avoid one outlet, Fox News seeing it as dissent, while believing they are getting a panoply of opinions from NPR, the BBC, the alphabet networks and CNN. This is like buying Frosted Flakes, Cocoa Puffs and Captain Crunch thinking you are providing a diverse breakfast diet for your kids.
They also don’t understand the concept that it’s easy for them to avoid right-wing opinions or narratives, but impossible for anyone right-of-center to avoid the echo chamber of the left’s which is everywhere.
You left out the Cheerios.
cdor: You left out the Cheerios.
No, he specifically mentioned the BBC.
Has he been eating that many fine meals, as well as enjoying the fine cigars and liquor?
You mean, they’re all women?
The hallmark of Progressives; they don’t seek to build, they seek only to tear down.
True, and how ironic.
I take all available measures to avoid the echo chamber of the left. CNN and MSNBC aren’t on my list of 50 surfable channels, not even their listings. Haven’t watched the broadcast networks daily news or morning shows in many years, or subscribed to the NY Times since the 1980’s. And yet their narratives penetrate. But how?
Credit Fox News. They show clips from CNN and MSNBC constantly, and have for years. Since many independents and Democrats watch Fox, we get exposure to them we wouldn’t get otherwise. Fox’s enemies should be grateful. With audiences as small as theirs, an old show biz adage applies: there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
Which sure doesn’t sound like progress to me.
We just switched from cable modem to a fiber-to-the-home service. One of the pleasurable parts of the changeover was going through the new channel lineup on our streaming tv service and deleting all those CNN-ish channels. So now we can’t even see their crap by accident.