SENDS IN THE CLOWNS: Scott aligned Fox with a merry imp!

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2025

"Deep misogyny," where is thy sting? "How did it ever get this far?" Don Corleone once asked.

With respect to the imitation of life known as the Fox News Channel, we're trying to tell you that tale. 

In yesterday's report, we showed you a dual headline from the New York Times which included an instructive turn of phrase. The dual headline had appeared in June 2023. You can spot the telling phrase here:

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.

Well rendered! Greg Gutfeld's "insult conservatism" had been installed as the institutional voice of the Fox News Channel!

As we noted, the Times was reporting the fact that CEO Suzanne Scott was installing Gutfeld and his towel-snapping partner, Jesse Watters as the new faces of this "cable news" channel. The channel was trying to emerge from a pair of ugly and deeply embarrassing scandals. The instructive turn of phrase—the new watchword—was this:

Insult conservatism

CEO Scott was now building her network around something called "insult conservativism." By happenstance, a good example of that wider style was on display, just yesterday, in what's left of the United States Senate.

Pam Bondi was the practitioner. This morning, the New York Times' report on her conduct at yesterday's oversight hearing starts with the session's first Q-and-A:

Pressed on Justice Dept. Politicization, Bondi Goes on Attack

[...] 

Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the committee, opened the questioning by asking if the White House had consulted Ms. Bondi on the deployment of federal troops to Chicago. She ignored the question and instead raised her voice to accuse Mr. Durbin, a 28-year veteran of the Senate who has delivered billions of dollars in criminal justice funding to his state, of disloyalty to his constituents.

“I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump,” she said.

So the insolent witness said, in response to the day's first question. She apparently loved that first lightning bolt so much that she brought the insult back again, a few hours later, in response to a question from Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA). 

As you can in this clip, she said it at 12:37 p.m.:

First, Senator Padilla, you've gone on for over five minutes, and I wish that you loved your home state as much as you hate President Trump. We'd be in really good shape then.

The AG had gone there again! Different people will have different reactions to these interview stylings.

In the past, we've referred to this sort of thing as a silent secession, where by "silent," we've meant "undeclared." But so it went, all through yesterday's hearing, as the "insult conservatism" prevailed. 

Bondi showcased the insult stylings all through the day. As of June of 2023, CEO Scott's "cable news" channel had apparently decided to adopt this approach as its distinguishing characteristic, or so said the New York Times in that month's report:

As part of a lineup shuffle hastened by [Tucker] 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 consort with Judge Jeanine of Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit fame, Gutfeld and Watters would continue to rule The Five, the nation's most-watched "cable news" show. But Watters would now own the channel's 8 o'clock hour—and the Gutfeld! show would be moving into the primetime 10 p.m. slot, which is 7 p.m. on the coast.

Regarding the insult stylings of Gutfeld himself, reporters Flegenheimer and Peters chose to soften their descriptions, as such high-end mainstream journalists typically do. First, though, let's be fair:

In their profile of Gutfeld's broadcast style, the Timesmen cited his (near constant) "scatological digressions." They even threw in a reference to his "hacky jokes about women drivers," one of the world's greatest throwbacks among lame-brained gender disparagements.  

They said that, in his years as an editor before coming to Fox, he had "spent much of his early career publishing paeans to male obnoxiousness in men’s magazines." Eventually, they were even willing to quote a former associate at Men's Health magazine saying this:

[Chief executive Ardale] Rodale’s daughter Maria, then an executive at the company, recalled Mr. Gutfeld as “deeply misogynistic,” if often consistent with his laddish surroundings. She was especially troubled by his casual disparagement of Prevention (another Rodale title at the time) and its readers, whom Mr. Gutfeld once described as “lonely women with cats and psoriasis.”

[...]

On Mr. Gutfeld’s watch, the magazine edged perceptibly into the culture wars, insulting Girl Scouts, mocking Hillary Clinton’s ankles and ranking “the best and worst colleges for men.”

As with Rush Limbaugh, so too with this guy—the first lady's "cankles" were wrong! Also, Prevention magazine's readers were a bunch of "lonely women with cats." The new figurehead of the Fox News Channel got there before JD Vance! 

In fairness, these hints were allowed to appear. But as is the norm among the mainstream journalists who pretend to profile this peculiar man, Flegenheimer and Peters seemed to feel that they had to bow to the frameworks preferred by the Fox News Channel. 

Speaking in their own voices, they quickly referred to Gutfeld's "merry trolling," through which he "has created a waggish refuge for viewers aghast at the country’s political direction." Later, they referred to "his roguish contrarianism," described as "a kind of insult conservatism that can frame any serious argument as a joke and any joke as a serious argument, leaving viewers to suss out the distinction."

That marvelous phrase appeared right there, right there in the article's text. But as other mainstream journalists have done, Flegenheimer and Peters chose to avert their gaze from the actual shape of this strange man's insult stylings. 

Everyone fakes it for Gutfeld! This past July, Mediaite's Colby Hall described Gutfeld as "a Fox News prankster" right in the headline of his profile. Back in February, Variety's Tatiana Siegel described Gutfeld as an "ascendant court jester...a comic whose self-styled brand is ridiculing liberal hypocrisy." 

Is that what this jester mocks? We would have to describe this passage as pure stone-cold deception:

"Gutfeld!” is a closer match to Bill Maher’s old ABC show “Politically Incorrect,” with co-hosts Kat Timpf and Tyrus helping to anchor conversations that frequently rib the obese, the easily triggered and the hosts of “The View.”

Does this court jester "frequently rib the (female) hosts of The View?” In fact, he routinely compares them to horses and cows, to whales and pigs, but also to cattle and "livestock." 

He trashes them in such braindead ways night after night, and it spirals straight downhill from there. During the 10 p.m. hour, D-list comedians sit around and cheer for whatever he says. 

That's part of what you actually see and hear on this Fox News Channel show. For whatever reason, few journalists want to report that unavoidable fact.

At any rate, whatever! Eventually, Flegenheimer and Peters placed this construction on the motives they attributed to the woman who had, slowly but surely, selected Gutfeld to serve as her network's best man:

His move in 2021 to weeknights at 11 reflected a programming creed of Ms. Scott, who has preferred to cultivate talent internally rather than cast about for fresher faces unfamiliar to viewers. Installing Mr. Gutfeld where an hour of hard news used to be, Ms. Scott reasoned that pandemic-weary audiences needed some levity.

Hard news was OUT and "levity" was IN. For the record, we know of no reason to think that CEO Scott really saw "levity," as opposed to insult and propaganda propagation, as the key offering here. But mainstream journalists have constantly peddled versions of that company line as they have pretended that the "insult conservatism" in question is secretly just the work of a harmless, merry imp.

Gutfeld was transitioned to prime time in 2023. He was said to be replacing an hour of "hard news," though little product of that description ever appears on this channel.

Meanwhile, Suzanne Scott had to work with her man to bring him into line at one point. We'll move to that matter tomorrow.

Her yacht is said to display this name on its stern: "Sends in The Clowns." Scott had chosen to escape an era of ugly and embarrassing scandal by turning to Watters and Gutfeld. But earlier, along the way, Gutfeld had been making his bones in a troubling way—by trashing one Donald J. Trump.

Almost surely, that type of "levity" wasn't going to play at this particular channel. Tomorrow, we'll turn to that part of this long and very dumb road, and we'll show you what happens when the clowns sent in to perform on these shows pretend to be trying to talk about actual matters of substance.

Hard news was gone, long gone. The potential demise of a large, struggling nation came next.

Tomorrow: Pure dumbness all the way down