#124 Disconnect the Fox

So not too long ago I was watching television. My remote finger stopped twitching round about channel 13, our local FOX Entertainment channel. They were talking about having a Married With Children reunion show. You may remember that Married With Children was considered by some to be quite groundbreaking in its time, dealing, as it did, with the subjects of sex and infidelity and maturing teenage boys. If fact, the show was much condemned by social conservatives and the religious right as an example of how low American culture has stooped in its endless demonic quest for titillation. By this time the twin scandals of embezzling Jim and Tammy Faye Baker and hotel-retreating Jimmy Swaggert had faded from the collective holier than thou-ness of the Christian Coalition. We are nothing if not a forgiving nation.
The teaser for Married With Children over, I watched a couple of promos for upcoming Malcolm in the Middle and Simpson episodes and then put my thumb into drive and coasted up the channels. I landed on Fox News which, as luck would have it, was having a panel discussion with Pat Buchanan and Ralph Reed about the shameless morality of our times and how Bill Clinton and the licentious liberals have slid us all down the slippery slope of immorality. Especially those Hollywood harridans of hell.
At this point the magnet in my brain started pointing to irony. And I began to think that Rupert Murdoch, Australian entrepreneur and egoist extraordinaire, had a deeper plan for America. Perhaps nothing less than the total breakdown of our society through a new civil war, this one based on the differing versions of morality exemplified by the two channels I just talked about. Fox Entertainment and Fox News, Rupert’s Revenge, the last attack of the British Empire against the upstart Colonies. Am I the only one who sees this disconnect between the owner of the two networks and the content of the two networks. Fox News criticizes directly all the over-the-top cheap thrills of Fox Entertainment. And Fox Entertainment indirectly pricks holes in the inflated balloons of morality that the hypocritical Fox Newsies puff up; Buchanan with his draft-dodging bum knee that kept him out of Vietnam but doesn’t seem to affect his daily jog; O’Reilly with his out of court settle the sexism lawsuit, Ralph Reed with his coterie of sinning preachers. Subjects the Simpsons love to lampoon.
You have to wonder, if left to itself without the extreme, flamboyant, shocking, scandalous, underwear-laundering foisted on the American public by Rupert Murdoch, if indeed TV today might not be a more genteel place. If Rupert wasn’t there to push the limits of taste and broadcast the near obscene and then there to loudly criticize the broadcast that he himself put on the air, what would our boring middle of the road American lives be like?
Can you say peaceful?
America, ya gotta love it.