Monday, March 18, 2019

FOX ALREADY HAS DONNA BRAZILE FOLLOWING HOUSE STYLE

I saw the headline of the opinion piece in which Donna Brazile announces that she's now a Fox News contributor...



... and my first thought was:



I hope she's making a lot of money. I hope she demanded a lot more money at the last minute during contract negotiations. Since the recent Jane Mayer piece on Fox News in The New Yorker, many of the mainstream journalists and pundits who've been in denial about the poison Fox injects into our politics have had the sudden realization that Fox isn't really a responsible news outlet with a conservative skew. They know it's a sewer now, although too many of their colleagues still don't get it (and too many of the ones who now appear to see the light still believe everything will be fine again once Donald Trump is out of office). We have a long way to go, but even the increased attention to Fox's destructiveness leaves the channel vulnerable. Fox clearly had a sudden, urgent need for a new commentator to liberal-wash the channel on selected "responsible" Potemkin-village programming, so the rest of the channel's frothers can continue profitably rousing the rabble as usual. In other words, Fox needed Brazile more than Brazile needed Fox. I hope she had the self-respect to demand fistfuls of money.

But in the opinion piece, I see that Fox is already imposing house style on Brazile:



It's theoretically possible that Brazile voluntarily used the right's preferred name for the Democratic Party -- just to be civil, you know -- but I think that's highly unlikely. No Democrat ever says "Democrat Party," so I assume the "ic" was trimmed off by a loyal ideologue on the copy desk, just to show Brazile who's boss.

Brazile was hired to be a useful idiot -- a punching bag some of the time, a moderate brought on to bash progressives at other times. Maybe she realizes that, But I wonder if she knows she was subtly humiliated on her first day. She should be furious. I'm sure she's not.

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