Tantaros, co-host
of Fox News show The Five made a light comment amid the gentle right-wing
repartee. Amongst the usual casual fare, this time about the poor living off
food stamps, she said: “I should try it
because, do you know how fabulous I'd look? I mean, the camera adds ten pounds.
It really does. I would be looking great.”
But as the
condition known as NAFS set in, it prevents her from justifying her alarming
comment. Instead, it sounds as if she has decided food stamps are a new
slimming plan for masochists. NAFS, or News Anchor Forgetfulness Syndrome
(geddit?) freezes neurons like a snowman’s knackers - right at the moment a
person should explain comments... comments which, on their own, sound like
something uttered by things in your most shiver-soaked nightmares.
The
reaction? What do you expect? Twitter, to begin with, lit up with the ferocity
of a Hammer film lynch mob. Women’s site Jezebel said she deserved the
heartless demon-lady award, saying of Tantaros “she giggled. She fucking
giggled at the thought of slumming it that hard.”
Luckily, this cruel bout of NAFS later released its grip on Tantaros’
mind, and she used Twitter to explain what she was saying: “Food stamps were
sold as a fitness plan to "look great" by our liberal, dense
government - remember?”
She is actually right – bizarrely enough, there is an obscure radio advert
which says someone looks great because they have been on the food stamps plan.
Some might needlessly complicate the matter – saying perhaps she should have
well, you know, made reference to the largely unnoticed advert to explain what
she meant. Or maybe that there is a difference between “looking great” and losing
weight. Thankfully, as the argument raged on, her very adult use of capitals on
Twitter meant everyone could just SHUT UP.
Unfortunately NAFS affected another Foxreporter the same week. In this
case, one brave news anchor forgot to reveal hitherto unknown information –
this time to justify a seemingly sexist comment.
Brian Kilmeade said to a caller, when they asked how Fox assembled its
news team, that they opened a Victoria's Secret catalogue, and then checked if
they could talk and went to college.
NAFS stopped Kilmeade from explaining himself, halting his many
quick-witted neurons from justifying what he said. What people didn’t know was that
a fellow anchor, Kimberly Guilfoyle, actually was a Victoria’s Secret model years ago. Luckily, this small
missing piece of information somehow found its way into the papers in the next
couple of days. Some might say it was coincidence, and that reporters happened
to look into something on the back of Kilmeade’s bonkers comment – that perhaps
he knew nothing about Guilfoyle. Some might say we don’t need to know anything
like this about Guilfoyle herself, and that the past is the past. Even more might
say was that even if Kilmeade was armed with this information, and explained it
on air, what he said was sexist. I would say that these jelly-legged girly-men
don’t appreciate the important house-style of Fox punditry, or appreciate how
NAF is triggered.
NAFS - the
cause
So how does
my not-at-all fictional NAFS come about? I think it is from the ongoing
stresses Fox presenters tirelessly endure, to bring people the best in 24-hour
punditry. Punditry means you have to have some sort of opinion, and at Fox it may well mean you have to run this in line
with a memo sent down by Fox management, who clearly want the best for their
media teams, and to guide them in the kindest way that they can. The writer of
Flat Earth News, Nick Davies, highlights one which said everyone had to refer
to the “political courage and practical cunning” of the Bush administration
throughout one particular day. I’m sure that, caught in amongst all these news stories
you have to report on, this particular insight is easy to forget. But the memo
is a great way of getting people to remember what’s important. And fun too:
like a news version of Balls of Steel.
And an
additional stress will have been caused by the mean and nasty things being said
about everyone at Fox News. All these “studies” by “academics” and their
“facts.” In one of these, the University of Maryland ran a survey on the
channel’s viewers to find out the effects of the channel on its audience back
in 2004. It said that 67 per cent of respondents thought Saddam Hussein had
ties with Al Quaeda – as opposed to 56 per cent at CBS, 49 at NBC, and 16 per
cent who just listened to NPR (formerly National Public Radio). Thirty-three
percent of Fox viewers had thought Iraq had WMD, when just 11 percent of radio
listeners thought this was the case. Meanwhile 35 per cent of Fox fans thought
the world wanted the USA to have its war with Iraq, as opposed to 5 per cent NPR.
Equally,
they need to deal with mixed and totally unfair attacks on their channel which
actually say it makes people thick. These
allegations followed two tests of people’s knowledge conducted by Fairleigh
Dickinson University. Although researcher Prof. Dan Cassino stepped in to
rebuff some interpretations of his findings, many of which had said that Fox
News makes people stupid, his mincing of words, well, make it worse:
“Overall, Fox
viewers were not better or worse than the average respondent at answering the
questions. That said, and all salient
variables being geekily controlled for, there was not merely a zero effect but
a negative effect of Fox News on viewers' ability to answer the questions;
meaning that Fox viewers would have done better had they been using almost any
other news source, or no news source at all. Results for the similarly
partisan MSNBC were... well, similar.”(my italics)
Quickly Fox
responded. “Considering FDU's undergraduate school is ranked as one of the
worst in the country, we suggest the school invest in improving its weak
academic program instead of spending money on frivolous polling – their student
body does not deserve to be so ill-informed.” Yay Fox! You hit that professor –
and about 12,000 students who had nothing to do with the research – where it
hurts. And well done on striking back using a sound, reasoned argument.
But things
have more recently been made worse by a self professed “mole” called Joe Muto,
who had hidden amongst the rank and file at Fox, and stepped forward with his
own shocking “opinion”. I’m sure some might say he was on some sort of
Democratic mission to destroy the channel, drunk on West Wing box sets. “The
people at Fox are not stupid,” he said to the Huffington Post. “They know when
they have Dick Morris or one of these other pundits on predicting a landslide
victory for Romney, the people behind the scenes know that it's all bluster.
They know that this is sort of an entertainment. They know that a lot of these
people are just hucksters ... we producers know that this is all a farce. The
reason we don't step in and give a reality check to our audience is because
that's terrible for ratings.”
Nonsense.
How could I possibly share conclusions with this man? I mean, like I told that
survey, Romney won... didn’t he?
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