SENDS IN THE CLOWNS: The experiment started at 3 a.m.!

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2025

Dumbing a nation way down: Her CIA code name is Sends in The Clowns, a respectful nod to the Lenape origins of her Parsippany region.

It's also a toast to the changes at a certain "cable news" channel—the revolution rendered in the years which have followed her ascent to the CEO chair.

She rose to that post in 2018. Was she really the person described in this report from The Guardian?

Meet Suzanne Scott: the new Fox News CEO who enforced 'miniskirt rule'

For Variety's take on that alleged rule, you can just click here.

Whatever! As we noted in yesterday's report, the CEO "has denied enforcing a dress code," though only "through a Fox News spokesperson." For the record, she traffics under the moniker Suzanne Scott "out among them English" (Witness, final declaration). 

With respect to the miniskirt rule, we'll briefly add this:

As of the last appearance by NAME WITHHELD on the 10 p.m. Gutfeld! show (that's 7 p.m. on the coast), the rule had seemed to become a micro miniskirt rule for the designated chair directly to the right of the host.

Were the ladies seated there each night actually wearing skirts at all? At times, opinions differed during this so-called upskirt era. That said:

Among the cultural forces driving the product at this channel has been an impulse to return to the culture of very large upper arms among the men, with extremely short miniskirts sported by the ladies. 

In fairness, there's no ultimate way to say what kind of "sexual politics" should obtain within a large, sprawling nation. But the Fox News Channel has largely moved toward the era of the "new masculinity," though the micromini era seems to have ended, on that particular TV show, over the past few months.

(Repeat: There is no objective way to establish an appropriate sexual politics. Susan Faludi wrote Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women—that was her framing—all the way back in 1991. The cultural pushback against an earlier era's feminism has continued along from there.)

Back to the story we began to tell yesterday, concerning the person called Sends in The Clowns.

"Scott" became CEO in 2018. At that time, the Fox News Channel was mired in a series of lawsuits alleging sexual harassment and the like within the channel's realm.

(Similar incidents soon appeared within major mainstream news orgs.)

As the worm turned, those were quickly seen as the glory days at Fox. In the wake of the 2020 election, the age of undisguised, outright lunacy descended on the organization.

This was the age of the fully metaphorical "clowns."

Eventually, the channeled shelled out $784 billion to Dominion Voting Systems for the lunatic claims that had been made on the air by the channels assembly of political/journalistic clowns. As we noted yesterday, these names are named by the leading authority:

 "Dominion focused on allegations made between November 2020 and January 2021 by hosts Maria Bartiromo, Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, and Jeanine Pirro. Guests who often appeared with these hosts included Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell."

The authority is willing to say those names. As for Scott herself, this email was frequently quoted, even as the culture at the channel was taking another turn:

“I can’t keep defending these reporters who don’t understand our viewers and how to handle stories."

Scott was referring to Fox reporters who were making accurate statements about the election. They didn't "understand our viewers," Scott had apparently said.

We can't say exactly what she meant by that statement—but behind the scenes, a revolution was now taking place—a type of revolution which had already been widely observed among this nation's basic cable channels.

It's been called "The Great Dumbing Down." One example would be the way the History Channel began living off dimwitted hokum about Ancient Aliens having invaded the earth. Another example would b the way a fine arts channel called Bravo! ended up building itself around the dimwitted spats presented as the soul of the Real Housewives franchise.

As these channels dumbed themselves down. the Fox News Channel was apparently looking or ways to make its product even dumber. This involved a strange experiment which was semi-reported by the New York Times in this report, dual headline included: 

How Fox News (Yes, Fox News) Managed to Beat ‘The Tonight Show’
Greg Gutfeld has installed his brand of insult conservatism as the institutional voice for the next generation of Fox News viewer. And it’s catching on.

The report appeared in June 2023. The TV show on which it centered was about to move from an 11 p.m. starting time—that was 8 p.m. out on the coast—to the prime time spot it currently holds, right there at 10 p.m. Eastern.

What a long, crazy trip it had been! As the news report started, Flegenheimer and Peters described the shape =of "insult conservatism" as practiced by the channel:

How Fox News (Yes, Fox News) Managed to Beat ‘The Tonight Show’

One evening in May, the most-watched man in late-night television these days staked out a curious if characteristic position: A 38-year-old teacher who allegedly had sex with a 16-year-old student, the host said, was the hero this nation needed.

“Can we live in the real world?” asked the host, Greg Gutfeld of Fox News, before invoking the Van Halen song “Hot for Teacher.” “It wasn’t written about ‘Hey, let’s have a responsible relationship with someone close to my age.’”

Reaction on the set of his show, “Gutfeld!”—where a regular, Kat Timpf, declared herself “vehemently against banging kids”—was mixed. The judgments online were swift.

“Fox News Is Now Praising Statutory Rape on Air,” The New Republic wrote, one of nearly a dozen outlets to sternly relay Mr. Gutfeld’s doings on his political satire-ish 11 p.m. hour.

This was the type of product Sends in The Clowns was now going to move into a 10 p.m. spot. That would be 9 p.m. in Chicago, 7 p.m. out on the coast.

In that opening anecdote, Flegenheimer and Peters quoted "a regular, Kat Timpf," a person some might sardonically describe as a "Fox News Channel feminist." The anecdote involved the skanky type of subject matter the CEO had apparently landed on as one of the potent new faces of the reinvented Fox News Channel.

In the age of Donald J. Trump, a long-standing conservative world built around "family values" had rapidly moved in a different direction—toward a culture which was coarser and much, much dumber than anything that had ever been seen on American news broadcasts before.

In effect, Sends in The Clowns had engineered a transition in which the channel would increasingly build its lineups around an aggregation which might be called The Real Flyweights of the Fox News Channel. A long experiment involving a weirdly coarse "insult conservatism" has taken the channel here.

At the Times, it could be said that Flegenheimer and Peters were perhaps over-intellectualizing a bit. But as they continued their report, this is the way they sketched the channel's transition:

Questions of intention and audience fluency—of what viewers are meant to understand about what is uttered on Fox’s air—have shadowed the network’s volatile and damaging recent history, suffusing its gargantuan Dominion settlement over bogus election fraud claims and the attendant departure of Tucker Carlson, its most popular anchor.

Yet as Fox plots its next chapter, executives have placed their non-recreational belief in Mr. Gutfeld, elevating his merry trolling and just-kidding-not-really-but-maybe bearing as an institutional voice for the next generation of viewers.

As part of a lineup shuffle hastened by Mr. Carlson’s ouster in April, Mr. Gutfeld, 58, will move to 10 p.m. next month, a promotion befitting his escalating clout at the network. The changes announced by Fox this week were the network’s first major overhaul of prime time programming since 2017. Jesse Watters will take over Mr. Carlson’s 8 p.m. slot, and both Mr. Gutfeld and Mr. Watters will remain co-hosts of “The Five” at 5 p.m., the most-watched show in cable news.

In Mr. Gutfeld’s telling, his teacher bit and the reaction it spawned are part of the grand plan that has delivered him to the ratings summit of late night, to the surprise and occasional horror of many former colleagues and industry stalwarts. To their eye, he has completed a baffling march from Fox’s 3 a.m. slot to a nightly forum where consciously hacky jokes about women drivers and Hunter Biden’s addictions garner a larger audience than “The Tonight Show.”

Gutfeld and Watters were going to be the new gargoyles of the Fox News Channel. Within the history of the American nation's TV news, it doesn't get dumber than that. 

When TV news arrived on these shores, its earliest icons—people like Murrow, Cronkite and Brinkley—were, to borrow from President Kennedy, deeply experienced American journalists who hailed from the heart of the country. At his inauguration, shortly after Robert Frost had recited The Gift Outright, the new president might have been describing these respected figures as he made this proclamation:

PRESIDENT KENNEDY (1/20/61):  Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

Within the realm of televised news, the torch had indeed been passed—to imperfect men who had reported from the battlefields of Europe, even from the Fuhrer's lair. 

These men had been tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace. They seemed to be proud of their nation's heritage.

That was the way we had been. At Fox, they were now being replaced by Bill O'Reilly's former "silly boy in the street," but also by Gutfeld himself, who is surely the least recognizable, coarsest person ever assigned to such a prominent role within American broadcast news.

It's true! The experiments with Gutfeld's "insult conservativism" had actually started on unwatched programs which aired at 3 in the morning (at midnight out on those coast). That lengthy experiment had predated the rise of Trump to political prominence. It had also predated Scott's rise to the top of the Fox "News" Channel.

What a long, peculiar trip it had been! We can't report the thinking behind this unusual bit of product development, but this is the way the leading authority records the chronology of this journalistic descent toward the bottom:

Greg Gutfeld

[...]

Beginning on February 5, 2007, Gutfeld served as host of the late-night talk show Red Eye on the Fox News Channel. The hour-long show initially aired at 2am. ET Monday through Saturday mornings and at 11pm on Saturday evenings. However, beginning in October 2007, the show began airing at 3am Monday through Saturday mornings while retaining its 11pm timeslot on Saturday evenings...On July 11, 2011, Gutfeld became a co-host and panelist on the Fox News political talk show The Five, which airs weekdays at 5:00 P.M. ET. Gutfeld left Red Eye in February 2015, with Tom Shillue succeeding him as host.

On May 31, 2015, Gutfeld began hosting a new weekly late-night talk show on Fox News called The Greg Gutfeld Show, which aired on Saturdays at 10pm. In February 2021, it was announced that beginning in the second quarter, the show would move to weeknights at 11pm; on March 10, it was announced that it would be called Gutfeld! and premiere on April 5, 2021. In August 2021, Gutfeld! overtook The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in the nightly ratings, becoming the highest-rated late-night talk show in the United States (though “Gutfeld!” aired in prime time at 8 p.m. on the West Coast and did not repeat at 11 p.m.).

So went the peculiar experiment. For the record:

In that last highlighted chunk, the leading authority betrays an unavoidable part of mainstream journalistic culture. In these manifestations, the broken toys of the mainstream world insist on reciting the talking-points of the Fox News Channel, even as they parenthetically note that the talking-point they're reciting doesn't actually make sense.

We're going to stop right here for today, adding this one conceptual point:

With the rise of the Gutfeld! show into primetime prominence, the CEO called Sends in The Clowns. was coming ever closer to earning her CIA / tribal name.

The new "clowns" she'd be sending in were now one step closer to literal clowns. They now included the collection of angry male comedians who sit by Gutfeld's side each night and agree with his angry insults and proclamations—with the astounding "insult conservativism" which is built around insults aimed at liberal women and endless jibes about how often President Biden has been "pooping or [BLEEPING] his pants."

That old miniskirt rule looks pretty tame compared to where we've been taken. As of the crackpot claims about Dominion, the "clowns" in question were political clowns. They've now been swapped out for comedians!

Along the way, this has produced the dumbest of all dumbing downs. Tomorrow, we'll continue from there. Can a nation survive this dumbing down, or this silence from Blue America?

Tomorrow: As Suzanne Scott keeps dumbing it down, the finer class of American journalists just keep averting their gaze