Goodbye, Jonah
-
Big fish.
Whale is simply supposition.
-
Kevin Williamson on The Fox Fix:
Random comments:
If a gig isn’t giving you what you need, then you quit. We’re all adults, and most of us have quit a job before — some of us have even been fired once or twice. I have a great deal more respect for Jonah Goldberg and his colleague Steve Hayes, who also resigned from Fox News, than I do for the cancel-culture types who spend their time trying to get other people fired. People who are willing to pay some personal price for their choices rather than trying to impose costs on others (often to their own personal benefit) are the people who have something to say that is worth listening to.
But there isn’t any particular obligation to quit, either. Journalism (and I suppose that we must consider cable-news punditry a mutant species of journalism) isn’t a preschool sandbox, and you don’t get cooties from playing with the wrong people. If you want to persuade people, then you will just have to grow up and suffer the indignity of being around people who see the world in a way that is at odds with your own views. Horrors.
(Never mind, for now, the absolute phoniness of these champagne populists presenting themselves as the tribunes of the working classes of the “Real American” heartland against the predation of “coastal elites” or “oligarchs.” Almost every one of them lives in Manhattan, the D.C. metro, or that New York City suburb known as Palm Beach, Fla. None of them chose to make a living or a life in Oklahoma, a Spanish-speaking border enclave, or some economically dead mill town in Ohio. Rush Limbaugh could have landed his Gulfstream G550 back home in Cape Girardeau any time he liked, and Rachel Maddow spent years opining about the plight of the poor while going home to a West Village loft she bought from a rock star. The tribunes of the plebs don’t so much as get downwind from actual poor people or poor communities, unlike, say, your favorite evil elitist correspondent.)
None of this is to say that Fox News and Tucker Carlson are the House of Elzevir and Galileo or the Little Review and Ulysses. Far from it. Fox News’s problem isn’t ground-breaking literature — it is irresponsible horsesh**. I know Tucker a little, and I couldn’t tell you why he does what he does. I don’t think it’s the money, which he doesn’t need, and it isn’t because he is stupid, which he is anything but. He is, among other things, a very fine writer. Tucker Carlson has genuine gifts, but so did Elmer Gantry.
From my point of view, the case against Fox News isn’t that it is dangerous or that Tucker Carlson’s work is likely to incite anybody to violence. (Maybe it will, but I doubt it. This country may generate a few school-shooters every year, but I don’t think it has the energy for a sustained intifada.) The case against Fox News is that it is tedious, repetitive, and lurid. Aesthetically and emotionally, it more often resembles pornography than it does, say, the commentary of Paul Harvey. One Fox insider says that some had stuck it out until the end of the Trump administration, confident that the network would make a return to something more like normal. That hasn’t happened. But for shareholders and on-air talent alike, the money is hard to walk away from.
-
-
I saw a story this afternoon that fox says they were not going to renew Goldbergs or Hayes’ contacts in 2022.
-
I saw a story this afternoon that fox says they were not going to renew Goldbergs or Hayes’ contacts in 2022.
@george-k said in Goodbye, Jonah:
I saw a story this afternoon that fox says they were not going to renew Goldbergs or Hayes’ contacts in 2022.
Yeah, I'd really gone off my ex-girlfriend before she dumped me. I just hadn't told anybody. It would have been rude to do that before I told her.
