Seriously, you can’t make this shit up. Fox and Friends went off on some crazy rant about how Mr. Rogers screwed up an entire generation of “self entitled” kids.
Fox news spouts mindless blather. News at 11. And 6. And 4. And all day long on the mindless blather channel.
To think, there’s people who WORK there, putting this stuff together. They can’t all buy into it…I don’t believe it’s possible to have that many stupid people in one place and have a whole tv channel come out of it. Clearly they realize they’re spewing bullshit. Right?
Spewing bullshit can pay very well. In these economic times, a job’s a job. You grit your teeth and keep shovelling.
A single television show is responsible for a generation of spoiled brats? Not parenting? Not entertainment that fixates on material success and upward mobility and glamorous narcissism? Not societal expectations that everyone will and should go to college and become a doctor, lawyer, or businessman? But a Presbyterian minister who had friends in the neighborhood and a magical land of puppets in his bookcase?!
By all accounts, Fred Rogers was an exemplar whose memory is tainted by this foul flock of vultures. The program was centered NOT around the fact that the child and only the child was ‘special’. When the concept was brought up, in was in the context that yes, the child was special but everyone was too. He taught tolerance and patience and morality, qualities that you would think that the ‘family values’ people would be supporting.
But, this is merely another tactic to get the Fox News brand more firmly embedded in the collective consciousness that is American media. Note, this is irrefutable in that we are talking about it now.
<sigh>
Of course they think he was evil. He stood for everything that they’re against - love, tolerance, intelligence, reason, and peace.
I’m surprised they haven’t called Santa Clause a socialist.
Fox, you can insult anything all you want (not that I’ll agree with you at all), but don’t fuck with Mr. Rogers.
(Not that it makes them any less douchey, but the incident was three years ago.)
I only recently learned that he once stood face to face with a hard-nosed senator and defended PBS with calm rational debate, and a song. The man was amazing.
Mr. Rogers defending PBS to the US Senate
If you have never seen this, watch and see. It’s about 7 minutes long and shows Mr. Rogers being cool as a cucumber in the Senate.
Here’s one of the articles Cracked did on Mr. Rogers:
5 Moments That Prove Mr. Rogers Was the Greatest American
Fox was always about making money for the corporation while pretending that they were about cultural conservatism. They couldn’t talk about the real reason that they were against Mr. Rogers. He worked for a non-profit network. He didn’t sell any spin-off toys from his show. He didn’t imply that all of the children watching his show were already from well-off families and would be rich some day (and if they weren’t they should act like they were). He didn’t tell them to whine to their parents about buying them everything advertised on TV.
If Fox actually cared about raising American children who would do better in college than the Asian children who studied with them, their message would have to be “Turn off the TV and do your homework.” Like a lot of rich people who pretend to be cultural conservatives, they show a lot of relatively rich people on their programs (and they show people in middle-class jobs who spend far too much relative to those jobs and live in far too nice homes relative to those jobs) while saying little about how hard one has to work if one wants to be rich in the future (assuming that you weren’t born rich). They say little about how frugally one has to live if one wants to work one’s way up in society. The real way to move up in the world is to study hard in school, work hard at one’s job, live frugally, and not watch a lot of TV.
You don’t fuck with a Navy SEAL Scout Marine Sniper!
CMC fnord!
2010?
AD Two thousand Freaking Ten and you bring this up now?
Yeah, Mr Rogers was awesome, but bitching about a three year old Fox News reaction is outrage as recreational as it fucking gets.
Any reason to repost the PBS-supporting video or that Cracked article is A-OK in my book.
And find the Esquire article - probably via the Internet Wayback Machine, if it’s not linked in the Cracked article - on Mr. Rogers that starts with the writer talking about his stuffed animal, Old Rabbit. Read the whole goddamned thing, and have some tissues handy. I cry like a baby every time I read it.
Which is ok because then people post things like this…
And that makes it all better.
I was going to say that Mr Rogers Neighborhood hasn’t aired since 2001, and that was twelve years ago, but the LSU professor who started this made his comments in 2007, so it is possible that his younger students then were watching Mr Rogers Neighborhood growing up. That said, he later retracted his remarks, saying, “The reference to Mr. Rogers was just a metaphor. I have no professional qualifications to evaluate the real problems or propose solutions. Mr. Rogers was a great American. I watched him with my children and wouldn’t hesitate to do so again if I had young children.”
Wait…Fox News is complaining about the malignant effect a television show can have on American society?
The irony…it burns…
Are Generation Xers known for their self-entitlement ways? Because I grew up on Mr. Rogers and I remember hearing about “self-esteem” as a kid. But grade-grubbing seems to have been a more recent phenomena.
Well, you can’t deny that they’re experts on the subject.