"Teakettle" by The Spacebase on Flickr.
Brooke Gladstone opens up this week’s “On the Media” with the following lines:
You know, most weeks, we could say something about Fox News (like Bill O’Reilly’s show stalking critics with camera crews, for example), but usually we don’t. Partly because Fox News won’t talk to us, partly because – well – it gets boring.
But this week – there’s the biggest joke in the world. The anti-taxation rallies, dubbed ‘tea parties,’ held by ‘teabaggers’ to protest ‘Obama’s’ ‘tax hikes,’ and ‘reported’ on most heavily by Fox ‘News.’
Mercifully, Brooke has the decency and dignity to lay off the “Teabagging” jokes, which – though hilarious – I have too much dignity to repeat (in print). You can tell, by the inflections in her voice when she mentions “teabagging jokes,” that she probably wanted a rundown of the best. I do too.
But rather than stoop to the level of cable news pundits, she holds back, and passes the reins of reportage over to Bob Garfield.
Who doesn’t disappoint so much as underwhelm. The whole Teabagging thing is stupid. I was hoping he’d tear his douchebag interviewee a new one. The guy – Adam Brandon, press secretary for Freedom Works – helped organize the teabaggers.
Or that he has two first names. You can’t trust a guy with two first names. (I don’t count Bob Garfield here, because the only person I know of with ‘Garfield’ as a first name is a cartoon cat. Who is funnier when he’s not around.)
Nevermind that Bob gets the guy to to admit that, yeah, Fox News helped us out a lot, and we organized the protests while telling everyone that they’re total grassroots things.
Nevermind that the Brandon himself coins a term – and a pretty good one – for fake grassroots campaigns: “Astroturfing.”
Bob seems to go pretty easy on him, despite his pretty weak arguments.
But there are two great moments:
- Bob mentions Fox broadcasting the news on “its” air – rather than “the” air. Which is pretty telling about how separate Fox News can be from the rest of the world.
- At the end of the interview, Brandon reveals that he’ll be protesting in in Revolutionary War-era military uniform. With period shoes. That have neither right nor left feet. To which Bob comments: “No right or left, eh? Only on your shoes, my friend. Only on your shoes.”
There are other interesting stories too, including a couple about Twitter. You’d think, given that both Kerry and I work in social media, that we’d be jumping at the bit to talk about it. But that’s the problem. We work in social media. We recap on Sunday. The Lord’s day. I don’t want to talk about work on Sunday.
Saturday, I would have.
This week’s “On the Media” recap has been written by Matthew while Kerry went out roller skating and having a good time and whooping it up with everyone at the rollerskating rink like the ice princess she would be if the wheels were blades.
PSSSH.
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