One of the best ways to keep up with what’s going on with Fox News — without having to actually watch it — is to follow Media Matters, which has a small army of journalists paid to monitor Fox and write up analyses of the most egregious nonsense. This little army does us all another favor by tweeting little screenshots of some of the stranger moments on the channel.
And they do get strange. Here’s a selection of actual Fox screenshots from the last week taken from the Twitter feeds of Media Matters reporters. (You can find them all, as well as a few other Fox Watchers, on my Twitter list called, naturally, foxwatch; I encourage you to follow everyone on the list.)
In the meantime, take it away, Tucker:
Just a reminder, Fox “News” may be fake, but these are all real. Even the one about M&Ms. Even Hannity’s trip down memory lane. Even the rest of them.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
You know what great moral issue I see here? Nosy busybodies poking their noses into what consenting adults do behind the curtains without checking first whether they also consent to the busybodies’ voyeurism.
@Moggie: exactly!
What goes on between a man and some consenting M&Ms* is nobody’s business.
I swear the right wing thinks more about other men’s penises than all the gay men I know. Combined.
*and who calls them “M&M _chocolates_”? Department of Redundancy Department much?
@ GSS:
You’re misconstruing the situation terribly. Obviously, the report is about Hunter randomly assaulting low ranked military personnel, dousing them with Bosco.
At least that’ll be what FOX claims after someone calls them out on how fucking stupid that headline is in a more publicly popular forum than Media Matters. It won’t be any more sensible, but at least they can try to play the “Our Boys Over There” argument for points…
What’s wrong with putting M&Ms on your junk? At least it’s a good old fashioned patriotic American candy! It’s not like Hunter Biden put any socialist French or Belgian chocolates on his dick. Geez.
Pffft. I’ve done the whole “someone smearing chocolate on your junk and licking it off” thing, and as fetishes go, that’s pretty mild. The entire original concept of M&Ms is that they don’t easily melt at body temperature, what are you even doing with that? The only things I can imagine are a little odd from a “vanilla” perspective, but aside from the risk of yeast infection for a vagina-haver (which Hunter presumably isn’t) are about as harmless as harmless gets.
The rest of it, well, that’s just how right-wing news fundamentally works. Someone randomly notices something which has been happening for decades, thinks it’s a new thing and reports it as such, someone else frames it as if it were a sign of the worst-case-scenario version of it from the far-right perspective were impending or already happening, and then comes the media frenzy with ever-changing details which are further and further removed from reality. Eventually it dies down, with everyone involved having egg on their face, with anywhere from a few to a few thousand innocent lives ruined over nothing… and unless some center-right pundit has an epiphany about this whole process, no one learns anything. Even then, what they learn is remarkably limited, and largely confined to said pundit themselves.
That’s not good, obviously, but that’s how it’s always been in the post-broadcast era.
I just cannot express how little of a shit I give if anyone at all puts chocolate on their privates. Not Hunter Biden, not Trump, not nobody. That’s high school rumor bullshit, not news.
I don’t watch Fox News, but that’s just beyond pathetic in the most base way possible. Wow. I mean just wow.
Like there are times when the sex lives of famous people should be discussed. Those times are the Jeffery Epstein and Harvey Weinstein times, when they’re hurting people and need to be stopped. Otherwise… why? Why are we talking about it? Who gives a flying fuck? Gargle the M&Ms! Stick them up his butt and eat ‘em one by one! Marinate them in his belly button for a week! I do. Not. Care.
(Also how do they know, was it the illegal theft of his laptop and stealing his private information? Or are they just making up any old bullshit as usual?)
As ridiculous as the M&M play is – what I’m honestly interested in is: How dangerous is FOX News? What’s your opinion on that Americans? I’ve seen the Cambridge Analytica documentation, I’ve read a lot about the way troll armies and info wars rage through the net – but from my comfortable spot in a European country that stuff looks like it’s straight out of a surreal comedic dystopian novel and it’s really, really scary… This is a major TV channel in one of the most influental nations of the world and it’s host act like the hosts of those russian “internet channels” that are aimed at the russian-speaking population in Germany and are basically openly lying propaganda campaigns.
@GSS: they want you to know it wasn’t peanut M&Ms. Maybe a Republican was caught with peanut M&Ms so they are okay.
Like how since Trump it is only bad to have _five_ kids with _three_ different women.
@Snowberry:
Pffft. I’ve done the whole “someone smearing chocolate on your junk and licking it off” thing, and as fetishes go, that’s pretty mild. The entire original concept of M&Ms is that they don’t easily melt at body temperature, what are you even doing with that?
…Maybe the idea is to see how many you can line up atop your erect member?
A better confection for the purpose might be Ice Cubes, a German-made candy that manages to combine decadent sophistication and childish sticky messiness: smooth unctuous blocks of cocoa, coconut oil, and hazel butter (and as fragile as the name suggests; the melting point is well below body temperature. At least one distributor requests that you not order them when daytime temperatures in your area are over 71 degrees, lest they melt in transit.)
The Hunter Biden thing is particularly bizarre because… who cares? I could see the argument for focusing on him about supposed Ukraine things, in that if you buy the right-wing narrative on that, it would be serious enough; but… last I checked, Hunter Biden is more or less a nobody. What the hell has he got to do with anything?
At least when the left was ranting about Jared and Ivanka, it was because, you know, they had actual jobs (for a certain definition of “job”) in the White House. And even then, I don’t remember anyone talking about their sex life. Probably because no one wants to think about it (I imagine that instead of the normal squooshy sounds, they clunk like Barbie and Ken), but beyond that, even if it turned out they had some bizarre perversion beyond liking one another, that would hardly have been a major reason to objecting to them, compared to everything else.
@Moggie
I mean… I’d eat her. It would be rude not to.
@rusalka
I bought and watched “Out Foxed” (Outfoxed?) back in the day. If you can find a copy, that’ll tell you pretty much everything you need to know. Or just check David’s links.
Ah, yes, Tucker Carlson, one of the few people not a member of a religious cult to put a positive spin on Warren Jeffs’ rape of a 12-year-old.
Missed the M&Ms bit, mostly because I don’t give a rat’s arse.
As much as the “M&Ms on privates” headline makes me laugh (the official-looking “Report:” and the guys’ Very Serious Expressions sell it), I’m confused by “Americans forced to admit white guilt for freedom.”
How do you parse that? White Americans are being forced to admit guilt (for racism, presumably) in order to be granted freedom? Or is it that they’re being forced to admit guilt for being freer than POC? (And yeah, which people were literally enslaved, again??)
On a lighter note, “DO OR DIE IN THE SUBURBS” is…art. It is. Do what, I’m not sure, but it sounds ominous.
@epitome: I live in the suburbs, and the only thing I can think of that’s DO OR DIE is mowing your lawn regularly. Secondarily is not leaving a junky old car or an RV out in public view, but that isn’t a hanging offense when you don’t have a HOA; you will be tutted and tsk’ed at though.
We’re the only white people on the block (except for half of the nice lesbian couple) and the crime rate hasn’t changed at all. I mean, there’s some illegal fireworks going on every 4th of July and Lunar New Year, but that’s not organized criminal action. It’s actually quieter here than when the place was almost all white.
Which reminds me, probably need to cut the grass soon. Might get frowned at.
@Mostly_Lurking: Thank you for the tipp with OutFoxed – never seen it! Watching it on yt right now where I also found this little gem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUbUPsVxmY8
🙂
I noticed that M&M thing showed up twice in two minutes. It was obviously some sort of sabotage, but must be addressed and explained. The news report had nothing to do with candy.