QUOTE OF THE DAY…. The “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” looked pretty successful on Saturday, with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert hanging out with about 215,000 friends.
But Ben Armbruster notes that the cast of “Fox & Friends” was not at all impressed.
[D]espite the rally’s overall light-hearted nature, Fox Newsers didn’t seem to care too much for it. On Fox & Friends yesterday, host Gretchen Carlson seemed uninformed about the rally, asking, “Did they call it the insanity something or other?” The former beauty contestant then mocked Stewart and Colbert saying that, “unfortunately,” many people think they are “news people.” “He looks fancy in his suit, like he is a real news person,” Carlson quipped.
First, many folks probably do consider these comedians “news people,” but those viewers tend to be pretty sharp. In 2004, the National Annenberg Election Survey found that Fox News viewers were the most confused about current events, while viewers of “The Daily Show” were among the best informed news consumers in the country. Comedy Central, relying on data from Nielsen Media Research, also found that Stewart’s audience not only knew more about current events, but were far better educated than Bill O’Reilly’s audience.
Three years later, the Pew Research Study published a report showing that “viewers of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report have the highest knowledge of national and international affairs, while Fox News viewers rank nearly dead last.”
Second, for Carlson to mock Stewart as looking “fancy in his suit, like he is a real news person,” is rather remarkable. She is, after all, the co-host of “Fox & Friends,” for crying out loud. Carlson may not have noticed, but she isn’t a media professional with any kind of journalistic standards, and she sits next to two buffoons who also happen to wear suits, as if they were “real news people.”
If the “Fox & Friends” cast wants to take some shots at Stewart and Colbert, that’s obviously fine. The Comedy Central hosts certainly seem to enjoy singling out Carlson, Doocy, and Kilmeade for well-deserved mockery.
But if silly media personalities who pretend to be Fox News “journalists” could spare us the quips about “real news people,” the back and forth would be far less annoying.
