Depth of Field
May 17th, 2011
You know something is off-kilter with GOP politics when more than one candidate is forced to decide whether they will run based on the schedule of television renewals, and you could tell how likely any one person was to run based on whether their show would continue for another season.
Hi, didn’t know where to put it and I didn’t find an email to you, so I’m putting it here. I remember your rants on Fox, and I just read a transcript of an interview with Barbara Corcoran, and after she sold her multimilion NY real estate business and before she got her Shark Tank show on ABC she was for a year a political expert on Fox. Just listen what she has to say about it:
[…]
Jonathan Fields: Right. And from there you started — you started with sort of spots where you’re focusing on real estate, and then grew it into –
Barbara Corcoran: No, no, no, the first spot — listen to this irony — was Fox TV. They hired me –
Jonathan Fields: Oh, right, right.
Barbara Corcoran: — the political consultant, me who had never read a newspaper in my life. Do you have any idea how dangerous that is? I used to memorize names, and I didn’t even know who the president was. So here I am being a political expert for a year, but at least they gave me a gig and that was the starting point.
[…]
That’s hillarious and frightening at the same time. Makes one wonder what other “experts” on Fox really know about what they talk about there
The interview (I found it very interesting):
http://www.jonathanfields.com/blog/getting-real-tv-barbara-corcoran-on-sharks-empires-and-family/
Somehow that does not surprise me at all. Fox seems to hire people purely for their political orientation and marketability, and rarely if ever for any level of expertise. Which is how we get maps with Iraq labeled as “Egypt,” and a nuclear reactor in Tokyo identified as “Shibuya Eggman.” It’s also how we get Fox News hosts and guests so often saying completely idiotic and clueless stuff all the time.
I wish I could be frightened by this, but it is now just what one expects from Fox. Best not to think of it as a “news” organization at all. The scary thing would only be that so many people do think of it that way, and that Fox has so successfully done its job as a propaganda machine.