Frederik Pohl
Jan. 23, 1995
It could happen to a nicer guy—
Listeners report that there are empty spots in Rush Limbaugh’s daily outpouring of venom where there used to be commercials, but now there’s just dead air because advertisers have been drawn away—
—but it wouldn’t.
There are quite a few people in this world whom I dislike intensely. A significant fraction of them are described as religious cult leaders, including the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, top man in the Unification Church. However, it is true that some time ago I accepted his invitation to attend some meetings of a conference he had organized as his guest, and have recently written about it in my blog.
This does not mean that I like Moon. What I like is the chance to see parts of our world and its people that I know little about, and sometimes my invitations come from human beings who represent causes or institutions I despise. (This has, for instance, been true of several recent administrations in this country.) I do try to make clear when I write about such things that I am not endorsing my host, and as a matter of fact I thought I had done so here. (I said early on in the piece that I thought Moon was an evil man, with his relentlessly right-wing Washington newspaper and his brainwashed young people confusing him with God.)
But, on the other hand, we only have one planet to share. I wish that the people I have to share it with did not include Moon, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney and several hundred others, but they have as much right to be here as I do. Pity. But if they were whisked away to Mars or Ganymede, who would I have to loathe?
As we were departing our last Hawaiian port of call, the captain got on the horn with bad news. He said the part of the Pacific Ocean we were heading into, which was most of it, was poorly served with American TV. Therefore CNN and ESPN and all the other feeds that had supplied most of the channels in our stateroom TVs were now but a memory. They wouldn’t be back until just before we docked in San Diego at the end of the cruise, but he was happy to announce that we wouldn’t be totally deprived of a voice from home. The Fox channel (which reached the Earth’s surface not from a communications satellite, like everybody else, but through a navigation satellite, which covered everywhere) would be glad to serve us while the real news people were absent.
In the event, it wasn’t any worse than I had expected. It wasn’t any better, either. As a news source, Fox suffered from not offering very much of it, preferring to allocate its time slots to its right-wing pundits — Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter and Newt Gingrich were among the ones they promised — for the purpose of explaining the true meaning of the news rather than delivering any. When big news stories broke, Fox did cover them, at least at first, on a reasonably factual basis: the crash landing of a bird-damaged jet in the Hudson River, the inauguration of President Barack Obama, the brief and not really explained in-and-out candidacy of Caroline Kennedy as appointee to Hillary Clinton’s vacated Senate seat.
Each of these events Fox kept alive for days, perhaps so that they could explicate the moral lessons involved: the faith-based explanations for the survival of the jet’s occupants, the theory that, since she was a member of the evil Kennedy tribe, Caroline probably had a trunkful of sordid secrets a fitness hearing would expose to the world. And, in order to give Obama’s inaugural address a fair and impartial review, they engaged a person who truly did know something about inaugural addresses. He had written both of George W. Bush’s.
(Confession: I haven’t actually experienced seventeen full days of Foxiness. Along about the tenth day, I finally figured out that, if I tuned to that channel but turned the sound down to zero, I would never have to hear the crazy-making utterances of Hannity, O’Reilly, et al anymore but could get a rough idea of what was going on in the world from the news crawl at the bottom of the screen, which, relatively speaking, was only mildly toxic.)
