It's becoming a tiresome rerun at the New York Times, assigning one liberal staffer or another to undergo the "torture" of watching hours of Fox News Channel to relate to the liberal Times audience just how horrendous it is. On Thursday, Times TV critic James Poniewozik surveyed the new prime-time lineup, now that the Times achieved its objective of getting Bill O'Reilly removed from FNC.
While O'Reilly "cultivated a salt-of-the-earth personal myth," Tucker Carlson is more of a fancy-pants preppy:
Mr. Carlson is more fleur-de-sel-of-the-earth. Graced with the prep-school diction of a heel from a 1980s college comedy, he’s leaned into a smirky, confrontational persona since the days of CNN’s Crossfire.
But to assume the audience has to want to have a beer with Mr. Carlson to like Tucker Carlson Tonight is to misunderstand cable news and American politics.
Mr. Carlson understands that politics today — as followed by cable-news addicts like the one in the White House — is attitudinal, not ideological. The reason to be for someone is who is against them. What matters more than policy is your side’s winning, and what matters more than your side’s winning is the other side’s losing.
So the major product of much conservative news media, to quote a popular postelection souvenir mug, is liberal tears. And Mr. Carlson drinks them like a refreshing chablis.
Poniewozik was rougher on The Five, comparing it to a zombie drama and compared Greg Gutfeld to the angry little magic man called Rumpelstiltskin (a weird insult since Poniewozik is short like Jon Stewart):
The Five began as a happy-hour gabfest at 5 p.m. Now it’s like Talking Dead to Mr. Carlson’s The Walking Dead, punchily chewing over much of the material that filled the hour before.
This being Fox, the five-person panel includes one person to the left — Bob Beckel or Juan Williams — whose role is often to be pained at the latest example of the left’s going too far.
The liveliest and most agitated voice on the show belongs to the libertarian Greg Gutfeld, who delivers every rant as if the maid who spun straw into gold just guessed his true name….
Where Tucker Carlson Tonight strikes sparks off its guests, the panelists have to generate their own. The Five often feels like the last hour of an office holiday party that will yield a chagrined memo from human resources.
Last year, Poniewozik was trashing Fox boss Roger Ailes as a figure like J. Edgar Hoover, a "power behind the power, unelected but mighty...ruling by force and fear."
