Dumbest hour in "cable news" history?

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 10, 2024

Watters circles the drain: We'll admit it:

In recent months, we've become fascinated by the somewhat surprising drift of the Fox News Channel's prime-time programs.

Rather, we've become fascinated by the drift of the channel's programming—by its unmistakable movement toward a type of programming which can best be captured by an old saying:

You can't legislate stupid.

Warning! It's very, very depressing to watch the ongoing drift of these Fox News shows. The sheer stupidity of this new style of programming may have hit a new low on last evening's Jesse Watters Primetime gong show.

Please don't ask us to summarize or critique the various things the program's host said and alleged last night. To get an idea of the dumbness involved here, you can sift through a list of the chyrons which were posted during Watters' braindead segment concerning Taylor Swift:

WHY IS TAYLOR SWIFT EVERYWHERE?
IS TAYLOR SWIFT A PENTAGON ASSET?
U.S. HAS LONG HISTORY OF USING CELEBRITIES
SWIFT'S BEAU IS CASHING IN ON PUSHING VACCINES
TAYLOR SWIFT IS THE PERFECT POLITICAL MOUTHPIECE
BIDEN CONFUSES SWIFT, BEYONCE AND BRITNEY SPEARS
PENTAGON PITCHED SWIFT TO COMBAT "DISINFORMATION"
IS THE GOVERNMENT USING TAYLOR SWIFT?
IS TAYLOR SWIFT A PENTAGON PSYOP?

Is Taylor Swift a Pentagon psyop? We're going to go with a no.

From there, it was on to a snarky segment about Jimmy Kimmel and Aaron Rodgers. This let the endlessly smarmy Watters extend his long-running set of speculations about possible contents of the long-awaited Jeffrey Epstein list.

Watters is the next generation of Fox News propagandist. He's been in training for this role dating back to his days as boy-on-the-street for The O'Reilly Factor. The sheer dumbness now being explored on his program is going to be very hard to refute, compete with, contain.

Under current arrangements, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity still perform old-line partisan commentary during the channel's 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. weeknight hours. That said:

At 8 p.m. and 10 p.m., the channel is turned over to the low-IQ, tabloid stylings of Watters and Greg Gutfeld, with the political views of the channel constantly marbled in. The 5 p.m. airing of The Five now serves as a daily parody of news-based discussion programs.

For the record, Taylor Swift isn't a Pentagon psyop. Also. as Watters is even prepared to admit, Jimmy Kimmel isn't a pedophile.

Beyond that, we know of no reason to believe that anyone, let alone "the media," was joking about an assassination of Donald J. Trump outside the courthouse yesterday morning. Watters offered a gong-show segment built around that theme too. 

His brief closing segment with Tony Robbins was a tribute to The Big Dumb. 

Advertisers love an audience which is very dumb. As the channel moves into the future, Fox News seems to be exploring the political and commercial possibilities found therein.

We don't see an easy way out of this cultural mess. Thanks to the invaluable work of the Internet Archive, you can watch the entirety of last evening's show, though we can't in good faith recommend it. 

If you decide to check it out, you'll be observing a corporate exploration of Tabloid Dumbness which is a threat to brain cells everywhere. Our public culture keeps spiraling down, and it's hard to see where this will stop.

There was a time, not long ago, when this sort of thing wasn't allowed! Will we ever be able to make American great in that time-honored way once again?