Fox Spews: An irregular column featuring selected morsels of regurgitated nonsense from everyone’s favorite propaganda pit.
Sarah Palin’s Alaska Ratings Plummet
After setting a TLC ratings record last week, Sarah Palin’s reality show plummeted for its second episode.
Sarah Palin’s Alaska fell 40% on Sunday night to 3 million viewers.
Not many were in the key adult demo either. Only 885,000 viewers were ages 18-49, dropping 44% from last week.
In fact, the median age of the show is 57 — that’s 15 years older than TLC’s average.
Gee. Who would have guessed that a program featuring a failed VP candidate and half-term governor, whose public approval is on par with herpes, would have trouble holding a television audience?
Glenn Beck’s Media Conspiracy Unraveled
During Glenn Beck’s Week of Soros, Beck advanced his theory that Soros was attempting to take control of the media. He offered as evidence a glimpse of a blackboard that he never showed close enough for the audience to see the elements of Soros’ alleged media empire. Well, I finally tracked down the source for Beck’s allegations. Wouldn’t you know, it was an article on Andrew Breitbart’s notoriously dishonest BigJournalism.
Beck’s Blackboard and BigJournalism’s media map (click images to see full size):
For the record, the Soros empire consists of NPR and a collection of mostly Internet media reform organizations. There is not a single prominent radio station or TV network or newspaper. Some empire. For comparison, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire consists of Fox News, Fox Business, the Fox Entertainment Network, FX, Fox Radio, the Fox TV Station Group, 20th Century Fox Studios, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Harper Collins Publishers, MySpace, Hulu, and much more domestically and internationally. Which one sounds like a mogul trying to take control of the media to you?
Bill O’Reilly Strikes Back At The Simpsons
Last night The Simpsons took another swipe at their Godfather Rupert and Fox News. The segment had Murdoch arriving at a meeting of media moguls in a helicopter with the Fox News logo and the motto “Not Racist, But # 1 With Racists.” Not surprisingly, Bill O’Reilly took offense at this saying…
“Continuing to bite the hand that feeds part of it, Fox Broadcasting once again allows its cartoon characters to run wild. Pinheads? I believe so.”
Presumably O’Reilly is disturbed that the folks at one Fox division would disparage another. So his reaction is to do the same thing. How is O’Reilly calling the producers and writers of the Simpsons pinheads any different than what the Simpsons did? Except that the Simpsons were joking and O’Reilly was serious. It seems to me that it is O’Reilly who is “biting the hand that feeds” him. And it’s a much bigger and more profitable hand because the Simpsons routinely get about twice the ratings that O’Reilly does.
