Tuned In+News Media | May 31, 2012

Fox News Produces Greatest Fox News Parody Video Ever

By James Poniewozik

It's hard to imagine a more over-the-top parody of Fox raw-meat-hurling, fear-stoking, base-pleasing agitprop if the network replaced Roger Ailes with Stephen Colbert. Here's the Fox & Friends' four-minute Obama-attack video, annotated in real time.

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Tuned In+News Media | March 7, 2012

CNN Poaches Palin From Fox (For a Few Minutes)

By James Poniewozik

The network sends a crew to Wasilla and gets Sarah Palin, Fox News analyst, to answer some questions as Sarah Palin, potential future GOP candidate.

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Tuned In+Television | December 1, 2011

Mitt Romney’s Toughest Crowd… Fox News?

By James Poniewozik

In this week’s print TIME, Joe Klein has a cover story on Mitt Romney’s inability to close the deal with Republican primary voters. For months, the polling trendline has looked like this: Romney has been cruising flat on the moving sidewalk of his campaign, while watching Rick Perry, then Herman Cain, and now Newt Gingrich [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | November 22, 2011

Poll: Fox News Viewers Less Informed (Except About the Nutritional Value of Pepper Spray)

By James Poniewozik

So here’s a finding that may or may not surprise you: a Fairleigh Dickinson University poll of New Jersey residents found that Fox News viewers were less well-informed about current events than respondents who watched no news at all. Our public discourse being the predictable thing it is, this means it’s time to debunk the [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | July 28, 2011

Video: The Daily Show Catches Fox's Religious Conversion (Over Terrorism)

By James Poniewozik

Sometimes a Daily Show comedy segment involves an elaborate, reported-in-the-field setup. Sometimes it’s a lengthy, constructed satirical riff. And sometimes it just involves finding somebody doing something colossally hypocritical, collecting a whole lot of videotape, and letting it roll while you sit back and eat an entire turkey. That’s what Jon Stewart and company did [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | July 12, 2011

The Hacking Scandal and the Two Faces of Murdoch

By James Poniewozik

The News of the World phone-hacking scandal in Great Britain is getting juicier and more astonishing. The long-runner paper was summarily killed by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in an apparent damage-control attempt; the legal investigation is widening; and the list of the paper’s purported snooping targets has widened to include crime victims, politicians and possibly [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | July 5, 2011

Fox News Hoax Attack Shows Need to Treat Twitter As Serious News

By James Poniewozik

The 4th of July tends to be a slow news day, but that wasn’t the case on Fox News’ politics Twitter feed—for all the wrong reasons. Early in the morning, a hacker group commandeered the account and posted a series of hoax messages indicating that President Obama had been assassinated in Iowa. (The President was [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | May 23, 2011

MSNBC Hires Non-Puppet Michael Steele; Roger Ailes Wants to Be GOP Puppetmaster

By James Poniewozik

Fox News’ Republican-professional commentator ranks have been thinning lately, with contributors Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum leaving to explore Presidential runs. So you’d think that Fox might be a promising perch for former GOP party chief Michael Steele. You would be wrong: the defenestrated RNC head is not an especially popular figure among the conservatives [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | January 26, 2011

SOTU Roundup; or, What Is Michele Bachmann Looking At?

By James Poniewozik

When CNN announced that it would air not only the official GOP response to the State of the Union address but a live Tea Party response, given by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), I was skeptical. On the one hand, it gave the GOP two responses—a courtesy not afforded to opposition party factions, third parties or [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | October 22, 2010

Juan Williams: Did He Have a Problem Opinion, or Do We Have a Problem With Opinions?

By James Poniewozik

You do not really need to shed a tear for Juan Williams, unless you weep droplets of gold, and them you can pile them on top of the three-year $2 million contract Williams received from Fox News after NPR cut ties with him. To sum up: Monday night, Williams said on The O’Reilly Factor that [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | April 22, 2010

Biting the Hand: When Media Companies Attack (Themselves)

By James Poniewozik

It’s always entertaining when Fox News takes on Fox Entertainment; nothing better captures the exciting contradictions of Rupert Murdoch’s blend of conservative punditry with anything-goes entertainment. First Sarah Palin attacked “Fox Hollywood” for a Family Guy bit about Down Syndrome that mocked her. And now, as Mediaite points out, Bill O’Reilly critiqued Fox hit Glee [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | April 16, 2010

Limits, Even at Fox News, to Promoting Tea Parties

By James Poniewozik

Yesterday was April 15, which is to say Tax Day, which is to say Tea Party Day, and needless to say that meant plenty of coverage on Fox News in particular of the anti-big-government protests held yesterday. One could get all J-school and tsk-tsk-y about how closely the news channel and especially its opinion hosts [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | February 5, 2010

Stewart on O'Reilly, Unedited: Worth the 42 Minutes

By James Poniewozik

FoxNews.com has posted the entire unedited interview of Jon Stewart by Bill O’Reilly on its website, and if you’re the least bit interested in media criticism, or Fox News criticism in particular, or discussions of politics and febrile American culture, or just tough but respectful debate, you really need to watch it. (By the way, [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | February 4, 2010

Stewart and O'Reilly: Taking on Fox News, on Fox News

By James Poniewozik

Last night we saw one of the best debates about media and politics in general, and Fox News in particular, that I’ve seen on TV in a while. That it was conducted by a professional talk-TV bloviator (Bill O’Reilly) and a late-night comedian (Jon Stewart) is nothing that should make anyone in the rest of [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | January 26, 2010

Fox: The Most Trusted Name in News

By James Poniewozik

OK, before the representatives of CNN and Media Matters shoot me e-mails, and Keith Olbermann names me The Worst Person in the World: Yes, I wrote the headline, but I didn’t take the poll on which it is based. Public Policy Polling surveyed Americans on which TV news operations they trust most and found that [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | January 11, 2010

Palin to Fox News; MSNBC Pundits to Senate?

By James Poniewozik

About a week ago, I wrote a column on the media as today’s preferred fast-track to a political career. Now I might need to update it already. The New York Times is reporting that former  governor / current author-Facebook-updater Sarah Palin is signing with Fox News as a contributor and host of “an occasional series.” [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | January 6, 2010

Brit Hume: Stop Persecuting Me for Trying to Convert Tiger

By James Poniewozik

Last weekend on Fox News Sunday, anchor-turned-commentator Brit Hume stirred up trouble saying that golfer/adulterer Tiger Woods should convert to Christianity from Buddhism, because Christianity uniquely offers the chance of redemption. Yesterday, in an interview with WTOP radio (h/t Ken Tucker), Hume stuck to his guns. Personally, as a half-Catholic-half-Jewish-pretty-much-totally-secular nonbeliever, I reject Hume’s suggestion [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | December 17, 2009

Fox Vs. MSNBC; or, Intensity Vs. Ratings

By James Poniewozik

Tuned In’s sister blog, RealClearPolitics, links this morning to a Wall Street Journal / NBC poll that finds 27% of Americans say that they get most of their news from Fox News compared with 5% for MSNBC (and 16% for CNN). When I first saw the headline, I thought: why bother asking? After all, there [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | December 7, 2009

Fox News, Talk Radio Hosts Strike Gold

By James Poniewozik

If you watch a lot of TV news, you become well aware of the consumer options for free credit reports, health-care products for the elderly and—if you watch Fox News in particular—gold. A fascinating story up at Politico examines the symbiosis between the conservative talkers peddling disaster and the various companies peddling the yellow stuff.

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Tuned In+November 12, 2009

Cable-News News: King Moves Up, Hannity Owns Up

By James Poniewozik

That was quick: Less than 24 hours after Lou Dobbs abruptly left the air, CNN has announced he’ll be replaced by magic-wall-wrangler John King, hosting a daily political program. King’s show begins early next year. Thereby ensuring that the network’s 7 p.m. hour will not have to deal with future Dobbs-like controversies, or, most likely, [...]