POP CULTURE: Fox News is for the kids

Two new shows find the conservative network straining for hipness

Greg Beato

Who says conservatives are against cloning? And environmentally indifferent? The first—and only—episode of The 1/2 Hour News Hour debuted two weeks ago, and now Fox News is rerunning it Sunday night. Such up-to-the-month coverage is a daring concept in today's climate of fast-moving news cycles, but talk about a small ecological footprint! In a typical two-week time period, The Daily Show pollutes the atmosphere with four hours of ruthless satire. In contrast, The 1/2 Hour News Hour has limited its comic emissions to an Ann Coulter line recycled from 2001, two fake commercials about the ACLU, a running—no, limping—gag about Ed Begley Jr.'s hybrid car and repeated insinuations that Barack Obama is smelly.

Which is not to say The 1/2 Hour News Hour is an irredeemable failure. As soon as its creators realize that even funny news shows work best when they're based on, you know, news, it should improve substantially. This may sound counterintuitive, especially to conservatives, who tend to believe that even real news should be as fake as possible. (Remember President Bush's Social Security tour last year, with its carefully cast audience members reciting pre-scripted questions in supposedly spontaneous town-hall meetings that were in fact more choreographed than an infomercial? Remember 2005's clandestine pundit scandals, wherein conservative para-journalists were caught endorsing various Bush administration programs without disclosing the big bucks they'd received from the federal government?)

While The Daily Show and The Colbert Report include simulated elements, their funniest, most revelatory segments involve genuine reporting. Correspondents interview real people and let them hang themselves. Staffers sift through video archives, searching for clips that can be juxtaposed and dissected for comic effect.

In contrast, almost everything about The 1/2 Hour News Hour lives up to the "fake news" label that is often used to (inaccurately) describe Comedy Central's news programs. The show's two co-anchors are actors Jenn Robertson and Kurt Long, but on the show they're known as Jennifer Lange and Kent McNally. The debut episode included two guests—both of whom were actors pretending to portray real people (a global warming expert and a man selling Che Guevara T-shirts). The conceit that Ed Begley Jr. was on his way to the show for an interview but having trouble getting there because of his unreliable hybrid car was as fake as the laugh track that supplied positive feedback when none could be coaxed from the studio audience. On The Daily Show, the manufactured nature of contemporary news and the servility of the press are constant targets; on The 1/2 Hour News Hour, they're rules to live by.

Trying even harder to not try at all, however, is Red Eye. Hosted by Greg Gutfeld, former editor of Stuff magazine, the show airs on weeknights at 11 p.m. and subscribes to the ingenious programming strategy pioneered by Politically Incorrect: Watching people sit around and talk about politics and the news of the day is only entertaining if they have no idea what they're talking about.

On Politically Incorrect, the fun was heightened by the presence of major celebrities determined to be taken seriously. On Red Eye, the panelists are mostly B-list pundits and bloggers who realize they're just there to fill time cheaply, and they attack the job like high school students serving detention—they're sleepy, indifferent, and when they can rouse themselves to it, cynically glib. Hollywood celebrities get bashed, liberals are derided, but porn gets a thumbs-up—it's like The O'Reilly Factor minus the phony

traditional-values posturing. Theoretically, this should help convince the youth it's okay to vote Republican, but only time will tell if the experiment's successful. Right now, it looks a little bit like a fly with Vincent Price's head on it.

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