Bill O'Reilly

Friday

Cockburn

Tucker Carlson, ‘belle of the ball’

Tucker time In the month since his death, Charlie Kirk has been credited for his role as a unifying figure on the American right. Nowhere was that more evident than at the Tuesday afternoon service posthumously awarding him the Presidential Medal of Honor, where four hosts of Fox News’s prestigious 8 p.m. slot posed for a photo together: Jesse Watters, Glenn Beck, Bill O‘Reilly and Tucker Carlson. Tucker also got a picture with Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham – incredible considering how acrimoniously things ended between him, his former network and a number of his other high-profile colleagues. (Carlson branded Hannity a “warmonger” as recently as June.

Tucker

Friday

Stephen L. Miller

O.J. Simpson was Patient Zero for our media culture

In the 2017 film I, Tonya, a biopic based on the Tonya Harding conspiracy and attack on figure skater Nancy Kerrigan, Martin Maddox (actor Bobby Cannavale) describes himself as a reporter for Hard Copy and calls it a “a pretty crappy show that ‘legitimate’ news outlets looked down on — and then became.” There was an entire spurt of tabloid news programming that spawned up in the 1990s, Hard Copy being one of them, along with Inside Edition, which gave us Bill O’Reilly.

Friday

Cockburn

Cockburn’s Christmas party chronicles

Shaker Heights, Ohio This year, Cockburn’s annual call for Christmas party invitations took him all over the country: DC, New York, even to one to “the longest-running libertarian-hosted Christmas party in Ohio.” What type of libertarians were these? he wondered, as visions of a drug-laced hors d'oeuvre platter and laissez-faire lovemaking danced in his head. “The party has spawned one marriage and three children,” Cockburn’s invitation said, confirming his suspicion (and hope) that all libertarians are also libertines. The Ohio party was advertised as “multi-generational,” and Cockburn’s would-be hosts helpfully added, “We managed to kill no one attending during Covid years.

christmas party

Thursday

Matt Purple

The war on Christmas comes home

America's longest war has just come home. Last week, Fox News’s All-American Christmas Tree, standing merrily outside the channel's headquarters in New York, was set on fire and destroyed. The arsonist was quickly arrested upon which he was subjected to the fearsome rigor of our justice system: released without bail as he cussed out reporters. We should pause here to note just how banal and predictable much of the late-night jesting about the blaze has been. It isn't that the likes of Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert shouldn't joke about the fire — crack all you like, and the Daily Show's "Pine Eleven" was pretty funny.

christmas