SATURDAY: The Five and the friends have been pushing back hard!

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2024

Out of many mouths, one: E pluribus unum! The leading authority on the traditional motto starts by telling us this:

E pluribus unum 

E pluribus unum ( Latin for "Out of many, one") is a traditional motto of the United States, appearing on the Great Seal along with Annuit cœptis (Latin for "he approves the undertaking") and Novus ordo seclorum (Latin for "New order of the ages") which appear on the reverse of the Great Seal; its inclusion on the seal was suggested by Pierre Eugene du Simitiere and approved in an act of the Congress of the Confederation in 1782. While its status as national motto was for many years unofficial, E pluribus unum was still considered the de facto motto of the United States from its early history. Eventually, the U.S. Congress passed an act in 1956 (H. J. Resolution 396), adopting "In God We Trust" as the official motto.

That the phrase "E pluribus unum" has thirteen letters makes its use symbolic of the original Thirteen Colonies which rebelled against the rule of the Kingdom of Great Britain...

In Latin, it even has thirteen letters! So the authority says.

Out of many, one! It was once considered to be the national motto. Today, it could be the motto of the Fox News Channel, whose many mouths have swung into action defending Candidate Trump with respect to what he recently said about nine rifles shooting at the face of the "very stupid" Liz Cheney.

Our of many corporate noggins, one uniform point of view! This is also a bit of a problem on the programs of MSNBC, the channel which spent year upon year pushing the now-abandoned desire to lock Donald Trump up.

Candidate Harris walked away from that standard theme, which had been beaten to death on MSNBC over the endless long years. We'll guess that the framework didn't poll especially well, a point we'd been suggesting for years right here at this site.

Whatever! Let's return to the tragicomic, soul-crushing problem which is found wherever the Fox friends roam.

Under the sway of a modern practice—it's known as "Segregation by viewpoint"—almost everyone who appears on a Fox News Channel program will agree, in every particular, with almost everyone else. And so it was, this very morning, on the sad show, Fox & Friends Weekend, with the three regular friends seated right there on the couch:

Fox & Friends Weekend: November 2, 2024
Will Cain: regular co-host
Rachel Campos-Duffy: regular co-host
Pete Hegseth: regular co-host

They're all extremely regular! Quite reliably, these friends will agree with each other on every conceivable point. 

As with MSNBC panels, so too on this ersatz news program. "Seldom is heard a discouraging word" as the messaging moves forward.

Presumably, the Murdochs could save a lot on salary if they assigned just one of the three friends to go on the air and read the day's mandated points. We'll take a guess:

Apparently, it looks more like a panel discussion when a trio of friends appear.

Is there some discernible point to this standard cable procedure? Is there some point to assembling a four- or five-member panel, if every member of the panel is guaranteed to agree with everyone else on every conceivable topic?

Presumably, there's major propaganda value to that procedure. There's propaganda value there, but not a whole lot else.

At any rate, the friends were very busy this morning defending Donald J. Trump. The same mandate had been observed yesterday afternoon at the start of The Five.

The Five is the most-watched program in all of cable news. It's also one of the programs on which the panelists don't all agree.

The popular program achieves its frisson from the inclusion of one liberal panelist who may well disagree. The fun starts with "the killing of the pig"—with the way The Four will interrupt and overtalk The One if the dissenter starts making a point which is perhaps a bit too sharp.

At such moments, the program recalls a seminal scene from the 1946 Hitchcock film, Notorious. In that scene, the Ingrid Bergman character suddenly realizes that she's being poisoned by the group of Nazis she has infiltrated through an insincere marriage. 

(When she mistakenly reaches for the cup of coffee which hasn't been poisoned, several of the Nazis respond in alarm, thereby creating an unmistakable "tell." For the record, we're speaking here of literal "Nazis;" there is no question of overwrought rhetoric. The Nazis have been slowly poisoning the Bergman character because they've learned that she's an American agent. The drama spools forward from there.)

To watch that seminal scene from Notorious, just click here. For us, the behavior of the four scripted players on The Five often recalls that scene, in tragicomic fashion.

Yesterday, the scripted players began the program with a defense of what their candidate said, the day before, about Liz Cheney. The lineup looked like this: 

The Five: November 1, 2024
Judge Jeanine: regular co-host
Jesse Watters: regular co-host
Greg Gutfeld: regular co-host
Martha MacCallum: substitute co-host
Jessica Tarlov: The Other

Jessica Tarlov was cast as The One, sitting among The Four. MacCallum was sitting in as a guest co-host, replacing the eternally compliant Dana Perino.

The various players were in place! Here's the way MacCallum started, still at 5:00 sharp:

MACCALLUM (11/1/24): ...Matt Drudge, blaring out this headline: "Trump calls for Cheney's execution." And other outlets quickly following suit as they mischaracterized some comments by former president Trump, made last night, about Liz Cheney being a war hawk. But listen to this closely:

At this point, Mccallum aired videotape of Candidate Trump's remarks to Tucker Carlson about "the very stupid" Cheney. And no! Unless you've gone around the bend, the former president wasn't literally calling for Cheney's literal execution.

Unless you've gone around the bend, he wasn't doing that!  He was doing something different—he was employing remarkably violent rhetoric as he savaged a "very stupid person" with whom he disagrees.

In his comments to Carlson, the former president wasn't literally calling for Cheney's literal execution. That wasn't the problem with what he did. At this highly fraught time—a time riddled with violent behavior by suggestible people—the problem was something different.

McCallum had played the videotape of what the former president said. She now offered this:

MACCALLUM: So the press wasted no time to follow Drudge's lead and did twist those comments. Watch this:

KASIE HUNT (videotape): Violent rhetoric. Donald Trump going after political foe Liz Cheney.

The press did twist Trump's comments, MacCallum assertively said. She then played that clip from CNN's Kasie Hunt—and that was the entire clip from Hunt. 

In the clip, Hunt hadn't "followed Drudge's lead" regarding execution. She had merely said that Trump used "violent rhetoric," which is of course what he did.

Under current arrangements, product like that is "close enough for Fox News Channel work." At any rate, the tightly edited video clips continued on from there. 

Of the five additional clips which MacCallum played, we'd have to say that only one even seemed to "follow Drudge's lead" in the manner described. That said, on a program like The Five, mandated corporate dogma will routinely take the place of competent journalism. 

At this point, four of the panelists took their turns insisting that the candidate had been viciously wronged all over "the media." In this unusual instance, Tarlov's response was so ineffectual that there was no need for everyone to interrupt her all at one, Notorious poisoning style.

The whole thing started up again when Fox & Friends Weekend convened. The trio of friends defended and defended and defended Trump again and again, an apparent sign that his use of violent rhetoric was perhaps doing him harm.

The friends took turns saying what they're paid to say. Stating the obvious, this sort of thing is a parody of journalism. It constitutes a fairly obvious "cancer on the democracy."

Thanks to the cyberattack on the Internet Archive, we can't link you to this morning's clowning. If you have the right sort of cable connection, you can watch last evening's edition of The Five simply by clicking here.

We'll close today with an observation about Fox friend Campos-Duffy.

Even now, months later, she still refuses to pronounce the name of the Democratic candidate in the way that person's name is correctly pronounced. Campos-Duffy is extremely genial among her friends, but is willing to behave this way with respect to Others.

With respect to Communists, Marxists, pagans and Others, the good cheer of this genial person quickly disappears. According to experts, this behavior is "human, all too human." 

It's human all the way down.

At any rate, the friends and The Four have been pushing back hard. The implied motto of such programming is clear:

Out of many (mouths), one!