They are also the crowd that thinks that Christianity is about hating gays and poor people when it is in fact about feeding the poor, healing the sick and loving everyone.
That’s the atheist Christianity, not the *real *one!
You know what they did to troublemakers back in Christ’s day, don’t you?
I don’t see any reason to believe that Rupert Murdoch actually cares one way or another about gay people. The only sense in which he worries about poor people is that he’d like to drain whatever money is left from them. I don’t think he actually has any views that could be described as culturally conservative. To do so he’d have to have some consistent moral views, rather than caring about nothing except making money. He’s dumped three wives so far. He married the second shortly after divorcing the first and the third shortly after divorcing the second, so I presume that in both cases he was having an affair that lead to the divorce.
To hate gay or poor people he would need a consistent moral position. He doesn’t have one. He shows programs in which conservative pundits pontificate about their views because they make money. He shows liberal programs (mostly comedies) on the Fox network because they make money. He’s gone from owning nothing except one newspaper in the fifth-largest Australian city to being worth $6 billion by thinking about nothing except money.
The thing I find ironic is that Mr. Rogers was actually a Christian, and pretty much the prototypical example of how a Christian should be. In railing against him, Fox was railing against the same message Jesus taught. Heck, Jesus was also very fond of kids and taught them that they were special: Matthew 19:14. You can’t get any more special than being the owners of heaven itself.
I think Murdoch is part of the conservative movement that realizes people who are scared and confused are easy to manipulate. The actual targets used to create fear and confusion aren’t important and can be changed as needed. The important thing is to keep coming up with new bogeymen so your audience doesn’t have a chance to calm down and start thinking. You want to keep them on the verge of panic and desperate for somebody to tell them what to do.
I think this bit from the Wiki on Mr. Rogers sums up his quiet moral authority well and may give a a window into why commercial broadcasting as a whole does not like him and his ilk. From the Daytime Emmy awards
[12][27]
RIP Mr. Rogers and thank you
Capt
You can’t fool me. There ain’t no Sanity Clause!
Shepard Smith, is that you?
Anyway, as ridiculous as this whole thing is on the surface, it’s even more ridiculous if you think about it for a second. Mr Rogers Neighborhood premiered in 1968. That means that a good percentage of the kids that grew up with the show are in their forties now. Grechen Carlson was born in 1966. There is no way in hell she didn’t watch Mr Rogers Neighborhood growing up. So to blame “kids today” on him… well I can’t even get pissed off about it because it’s just too laughable.
I recall watching a few episodes with my small kids while on vacation back in the 80’s. It always amused me that on tours he often managed to show things like the restrooms.
I recall one on flying on a jet and he showed the WC to the kids. Those things loom large in a four year old’s mind.
He never was unkind and I always approved the way he separated fantasy from reality, something Faux News does not do.
I dont remember Mr. Rogers telling me i was entitled to a dang thing other than a little respect and courtesy.
Although now that I think about it, if my argument is that Mr Rogers Neighborhood doesn’t turn kids into self entitled douchenozzles, maybe I shouldn’t hold up Grechen Carlson et al as examples.
She might not have seen it; maybe her parents thought he was a “fruit” like my husband’s dad did, and forbade her from watching. The difference is, my husband could have used it for a father figure to tell him he was worth something and special, but he turned out all right anyway. She apparently missed out on the lessons Mr. Rogers taught.
Truer words were never spoken.
Hell, I had two parents and Mr. Rogers was still a fatherly presence for me. And unlike Daddy, he wasn’t scarily unpredictable and always on the verge of rage. He wasn’t too tired to talk and play when he got home from work. And our outings together were always fun and pleasant, completely unmarred by yelling and bug-eyed temper flaring and embarrassment.
I was old enough to know that Mr. Rogers really couldn’t see me through the television, so when he said “I love you”, I didn’t really believe it. But he was still a positive presence growing up. My parents, who didn’t know what the hell their kids were watching on TV, better thank their lucky stars that there were programs like Mr. Rogers on the air.
Sorry to spam the thread a bit, but the whole topic is just too damn funny to me. Fox News did a similar thing a couple of years ago when they accused the Muppets of, and I’m quoting here, “trying to brainwash your kids against capitalism”
edit:
Wait, hold on a second. I had typed up a couple of funny lines about what The Daily Show would do with this on Monday, but then I noticed the link in the OP is dated 2010. We’re pitting them for something that happened three years ago. It’s still ridiculous, but, well, the dated factor makes it seem a bit stale.
This month Joe Muto, the Fox News mole, published his book An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal’s Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media. At TPM Prime, MfM posed some (“exclusive”!) questions to Mr. Muto during his book tour. Excepts follow: MfM: What share of the Fox News audience believe they are in on the joke? What share are in on the joke?
Joe Muto: The audience? We tended to look at the audience as pretty gullible. Some of them must know that it’s a performance to some extent, but a lot of them earnestly believe that Fox News is singlehandedly saving the country.
The staffers, were all in on the joke. Even the ultra-conservative producers would admit that they knew that the whole “Fair and Balanced” thing was bullshit. We knew we were there for one reason – to stir up the crazies and provoke outrage, because outrage equals ratings. Joe Muto spent five years working under Bill O’Reilly. His memoir is funny and entertaining, though perhaps not as funny as Al Franken’s work. But then Franken didn’t have the insider perspective that Muto had.
Yeah, The Mr. Rogers thing is currently showing up in the Hufffpo. It didn’t occur to me that they would post something so old.
Still though, any excuse to pit Fox…
On the negative side, Mr Rodgers was responsible for the zombie apocalypse.
No, seriously.