No one really takes Fox’s mantra of “fair and balanced” seriously, but for all of its faults it has, until now, remained a NEWS channel – albeit one that tilts rightward. In some cases, when it is doing straight news, Fox can actually provide a perspective that is missing from other networks. However, the decision to air “The Half Hour News Hour” puts Fox squarely in the category of the Comedy Channel.

Why would a news channel air a comedy show? One reason is that it is unlikely that any other network, including the Comedy Channel, would air a program as bad as “The Half Hour News Hour.” But the real reason is plain — Fox has never been about news. And with the creation and airing of “The Half Hour News Hour,” Fox has provided proof to its critics who say that it cannot be considered a serious news channel. Fox will claim otherwise, of course, and it is in this claim that it commits the fraud that so disgraces the integrity of journalism. It now airs a featured comedy program that puts its entire news operation in the shadow of its fictionalized right-wing “comedy” output.

The creator of the show, Joel Surnow, explained to TV Guide, as quoted in The Guardian Feb. 16, why he thought there was a need for such a program. “One of the things that's definitely not out there is a satirical voice that skews to the right as opposed to the left,” he said. “You can turn on any comedy satire show on TV and you're going to hear 10 Bush jokes, 10 Cheney jokes. But you'll never hear a Hillary Clinton joke or a global warming send-up. It's just not out there.”

Well, actually “The Daily Show” does make fun of Hillary Clinton. It also had its share of fun with her husband Bill, and with a plethora of other Democrats. That’s because it’s a comedy show on a comedy channel. But Surnow’s paranoia demonstrates the limitations on the thinking of many right-wingers. They can’t see the bigger picture because they’re blinded by their persecution complex.

Added Surnow about his creation, “It's not a mean-spirited show. I think the one thing we target more than anything else is hysteria: the hysteria over global warming, the hysteria over Barack Obama, college kids' hysteria over Che Guevera T-shirts. This is funny. This is irrational behaviour that has lodged itself in our culture, and no one stops to go, ‘Wait a minute: this is kind of absurd.’”

Right. It is hilarious to be hysterical over the collapse of ecological habitats and flooding of coastlines. But I would tend to agree that the show is not that mean-spirited. It’s also not very funny. The first installment featured a modestly conceived feature on Democrats’ hysteria over Barack Obama, mentioning that there was a new magazine on all things Barack Obama. The magazine, after the candidate’s initials, is called “B.O.” Yuckety yuck, that’s a good one.

But it’s too easy to make fun of the content of “The Half Hour News Hour.” So it is with most Republican attempts at humor; their “jokes” fall flat because many of them have a largely humorless black-and-white worldview, free of doubt about their own opinions, wholly partisan, authoritarian and oblivious to the silliness of much of politics on both sides of the aisle.

The real problem with the new Fox news program is the fact that a supposedly serious news channel would choose to air it. It’s easy to see why – Stewart, with his cool cachet and hilarious takes on the news, has dominated news viewership on college campuses for years. For the first time in a long time, it isn’t cool to be a Young Republican. If the right wing loses the next generation – and many public opinion surveys show that generation to be more open-minded and liberal than those before it – then one has to speculate on what future the right wing really has.

Fox is trying to make up that coolness gap – with unintentionally hilarious consequences. So in that sense, “The Half Hour News Hour” may turn out to be a blessing if anyone bothers to watch it. If the right wing can’t come up with better material than this, they’ll probably lose even more of the youth vote. And since the show has finally put to rest any argument that Fox isn’t a disgrace to journalism that it is, it seems likely the right won’t have the last laugh — even if it is canned.

Guy Reel is an assistant professor of mass communication at Winthrop University. He can be reached at reelg@winthrop.edu

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