CNN might as well change their name to AFAT Network – and not just because of Brian Stelter. Okay, mostly because of Brian Stelter, but not because he’s fat. They have become the All Fox All the Time Network.
They obsess about Fox News in a creepy, stalker ex-girlfriend kinda way.
Brian Stelter isn’t the “chief media correspondent;” he’s the All Fox All the Time correspondent – or, as I once called him “The Gladys Kravitz of cable news.”
Brian is so fixated on his competitor he even wrote a book about Fox.
I have this mental picture of Brian Stelter, like the last days of Dick Nixon, sitting in a dark room with the TV tuned to Fox, furiously muttering under his breath while anger eating a tub of ice cream.
Remember the movie “Say Anything?” The John Cusack character’s friend Corey Flood gets dumped by her boyfriend Joe, then spends the entire movie obsessing about him. “Joe. She’s written 65 songs. Sixty-five. They’re all about you. They’re all about pain.”
(“Joe lies. He lies when he cries.”).
Brian Stelter is the nominally male version of Corey Flood (“Tucker lies. He lies when he cries.”).
It’s kind of embarrassing.
But it isn’t just Brian and his sidekick Oliver Darcy who have hopped aboard the All Fox All the Time beat. Throughout CNN the obsession with Fox is spreading faster than a case of the Wuhan Flu.
“Tucker lies. He lies when he cries.”
CNN’s target audience must consist of people who don’t watch Fox News, but still want to know what’s going on over at Fox. I can’t imagine that’s a particularly large segment of the cable viewing population – which might explain why CNN’s ratings have been in the toilet for years.
And yet the All Fox All the Time Network doesn’t seem at all aware of just how silly their Fox obsession is.
Last month Brian announced that his Fox News book has been updated to include twelve (count ‘em TWELVE) new chapters — as if it’s a completely healthy and normal thing to obsessively perseverate about the competition.
In addition to pearl-clutching over the stories Fox covers, CNN is also hyper-focused on what news stories Fox is not covering.
Of course spending all their time covering what Fox isn’t covering may explain why they have no time left to cover the CuomoGate nursing home scandal.
As things stand, the only way to get CNN to focus on Cuomo sending thousands of seniors to die then covering it up is if Fox News offers Andrew Cuomo his own show called “Getting Away with Killing Grandma.”
On 9/11, the two TVs in my house were both on non-stop – one TV had CNN and the other Fox News. And neither TV got turned off for the entire day. Then again, twenty years ago, CNN was still a news network.
If I still had cable TV (I don’t) and a cataclysmic event happened today, the very last thing I would do is tune in to CNN.
Then again, why would I bother?
If I wanted to know how Fox News was covering this hypothetical event, I’d just tune in to Fox News.