Is it just me, or do the Fox News Channel‘s recent missteps strike you as qualitatively different from what has come before? It’s as though your eccentric uncle has finally gone off the deep end, his uncertain grounding in reality having given way to something else entirely.
The latest, as you may have heard, is that Fox altered photos of two New York Times reporters to make them appear more sinister, elongating their faces, yellowing their teeth and giving one of them a receding hairline.
That follows Fox’s labeling Michelle Obama as “Obama’s Baby Mama!”, and Fox host E.D. Hill’s wondering whether the Obamas’ playful fist bump was a “terrorist fist jab.”
You can dismiss all of this as right-wing propaganda if you like. I’m not so sure. It strikes me as genuinely nutty, and it makes me wonder whether the rudder has fallen off.
Think it has anything to do with Roger Ailes’ being unhappy over the nice things Rupert Murdoch has said about Barack Obama? Just wondering.