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Fox News Considered Suing Fox's "The Simpsons"
ZeDanimal writes "The Simpsons' pooh-bah Matt Groening said in an NPR interview this week that the Fox News Channel considered legal action against the show for its parody of the station's news ticker. Broadcast, of course, by Fox Entertainment, the episode that raised the ire of the "Fair and Balanced" Fox News crew was Krusty For Congress, which mocked the perceived rightward-leanings of the channel with pseudo-news items such as "Do Democrats cause cancer?" and "Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple" scrolling across the bottom of the screen. Guess the powers-that-be learned something from the Al Franken affair... or maybe they just feared getting into a popularity contest with the likes of the inanimate carbon rod."
...if they think no-one will notice the difference between their warped take on reality and the Simpsons'.
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
Remember, conservatives are so dumb that they think Dan Quayle is smart.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
It's not that FNC is conservative, as much as the rest of the news is liberal. I agree that Fox News is not fair and balanced, and that's coming from a conservative libertarian. Bill O'Riley's a joke. 'No spin zone?!' Frivolous! Hannitiy is good, albeit boring at times, and Colmes in a poor counterattack. Just my two cents.
~UltraSkuzzi
This comment is liscensed by SCO.
"Fair and Balanced" my ass. What's FN's next tagline, "Trust Me"?
No matter how many of my rights are taken away, somehow I still don't feel safe. -Frigid Monkey
fox news is kinda like gator..err claria. they don't like people pointing out the truth.
remember...corporate america has more rights than you do!
Just like Fox was leftist when Clinton was president, right?
There are reasons why democracy does not work nearly as well as capitalism.
-- David D. Friedman
OK. I'm not trying to argue with you here, I'm trying to help you. Keep that in mind.
1. "We've had it cramed (sic) down our throats by every radio talk show zelot (sic), republican (sic) candidate, and conservitive (sic) figure we're willing to listen to."
Why would anyone be willing to listen to someone who crammed something down our throats?
2. Your whole thesis (News companies are owned by corporations; corporations are conservative; ergo news companies must be conservative) has been debunked so many times it's getting tiresome.
First, there's no reason a corporation has to be conservative. Levi Strauss is a corporation, yet they were among the first to grant benefits to "domestic partners." Apple Computer is a corporation. They might oppose regulation of the computer industry, but does that mean you'd call Steve Jobs a conservative?
Second, it just doesn't bear up empirically. Would you call McClatchy a conservative organization? The New York Times is a corporation, yet their editorials consistently advocate liberal positions on the various issues of the day. How can this be? Heck, under your model, no liberals would own stock. Ever hear of Warren Buffet?
3. It is *stunning* that anyone who professes to know what they are talking about would still cite that Kampfner story, which has been debunked (by the Washington Post, among others) so many times it also is getting tiresome. Some of the problems are obvious (Special Forces entering a potentially hostile area firing *blanks*?), some aren't. (It later turned out the ambulance driver never actually said the Americans were firing at *him*. He simply heard gunfire ahead and, prudently, turned around. Yet the passage in the story gives the reader the clear understanding that the Americans were firing at the ambulance.) Many more problems with it have been pointed out by others; just do a tiny bit of web research.
4. "Blatantly false information..."
Please let me know what this blatantly false information is. Is it "The British have learned...?" You may think this is weaselly, but since the British stand by it to this day, it's certainly not "blatantly false." Is it the whole WMD thing? I hope not, because I can come up with a whole list of quotes from Democrats -- including Bill Clinton -- and foreign leaders who also believed Hussein was hiding them. Wrong, perhaps, but certainly not "blatantly false."
5. "Lied about what happened IN the war"
One single example, please. That's all I ask.
6. "Systematically dismanteling (sic) the individual rights of the US population"
Oh for Pete's sake. Name one right I had in 1999 that I don't have now.
7. "Clinton was impeached for lieing (sic) before Congress."
Clinton was impeached for lying under oath before *a grand jury*, and for obstruction of justice (i.e., tampering with witnesses). For crying out loud, why was this modded as insightful? You can't even get the most basic facts straight!
So there's no self-reflection? No sense that gosh, maybe I should be more skeptical when I hear about things that seem too good to be true, even if -- or *particularly* if -- they meet my preconceived notions about the way things are?
Actually I'm not surprised -- if there's one generalization I could make about /.ers, it's (of course) that they're nerds. But if there's two, they're that their nerds and have real problems admitting they're wrong. Like you, they just change the parameters of the argument and move on.
It's actually kind of discouraging. My post is buried down here, so most /.ers aren't even going to realize the story's not true. But that's par for the course today. I also posted a factual, informative rebuttal to another guy in this same thread, and got labeled a troll. WTF?