Fox News Tackles Literature: Class Act as Always
Remember the time Fox News pissed on Kurt Vonnegut‘s grave? The network upheld its belles lettres legacy the other night as Greg Gutfeld and his Red Eye cohorts branded Stephen King “partially brain-dead” and “a raging alcoholic,” along with cracking jokes about running him over in a van, because they didn’t like the way he phrased his exhortation to teens to read more:
Granted: “If you can read, you can walk into a job later on; if you can’t, then you’ve got the Army, Iraq, I don’t know, something like that” isn’t the best possible endorsement for literacy—frankly, as the son of Vietnam-era Marines, I find it more than a little offensive—and the initial framing of the discussion, where Fox commentator Mike Baker dismisses the remark as “leftist elitist crap,” is coarse but not entirely out of bounds—but the conversation quickly moves away from King’s political stance and his alleged lack of patriotism to roughly three minutes of speculation about whether that infamous car accident left him with permanent brain damage. But let’s face it: People who sit there asking “wasn’t there some NFL player who went into the army, too?” aren’t exactly in a position to question anybody else’s grasp of current events. (Although maybe, he added sarcastically, Fox just doesn’t like their talent to bring up Pat Tillman on air because his example raises too many awkward questions about the way the war’s been fought.)
As Tina Dupuy of FishbowlLA comments, “A writer—telling kids to read—what a loser. It’s the best nerd bashing-geek punching prom ever!”
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