Dear Fox News…
Dear Fox News,
It has come to my attention (by way of your reporter Peter Doocy and a few others) that you are unhappy about not being on President Biden’s official call-on list for his recent press conference and other events. Mr. Doocy recently complained (rather bitterly I thought) to the President’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, that Fox had been left out. You asked why, so here’s your answer.
Pssst, come a little closer and I’ll tell you a secret. I’ll tell you why you were left off the list. Ready? It’s because you are FAKE NEWS. No, I didn’t think you’d like it.
But that’s the reason why. The very fact that you insist on being the news instead of reporting the news is one of the reasons you are fake news. If you spent more time reporting facts instead of joining the Republican Party in a long, loud chorus of whines about how unfairly you have been treated, maybe the President would take you seriously. Maybe then you’d qualify as real news.
Mr. Doocy wasn’t the only one at your network who was whining. So was Sean Hannity. Hannity was upset because no one was able to ask the President about why he fell down the stairs on Air Force One, or about his cognitive abilities, or the “scandals swirling around zero-experience Hunter Biden,” and other absurdities like that. And then you wonder why you’re not on the list. Wow.
Mr. Hannity also criticized the President for using notes during his press conference. “I’ve been doing radio since 1987, here on the Fox News channel since 1996,” Hannity said. “Never in my lifetime have I ever seen anything like this before.” Right. Except of course when Donald Trump used notes written in Sharpie to remind everyone “I want nothing, I want nothing, I want no quid pro quo. Tell Zelensky, president Zelensky, to do the right thing.” Or the time he had notes with him when meeting with families of victims of gun violence reminding him to say, “I hear you,” because Trump was and remains a conscience-free sociopath who needs notes to remind him how to act like a normal human being.
Never mind that you’ve spent the last five years promoting a psychotic rapist and traitor in obvious servitude to a disgusting Russian dictator, I have to wonder what makes you think you qualify to spend five minutes in the same room with the President of the United States. The very fact that you contributed to an illegal attempt to overthrow the American government by calling into question the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election more than 800 times, and counting, ought to get many on your staff long prison sentences. In a less tolerant society (a society you constantly work to undermine) you’d have a lot more to worry about than not being called on during a press conference.
Anyway, before you launch into your next assault on the President of the United States about why he’s only had one press conference, replacing your previous assault on the President of the United States because he hasn’t had any press conferences, I thought you might like to know why you’re not on that list. I hope I’ve been of some help. You seem to need a lot of help when it comes to answering obvious questions.
I close with one other thing. If I were President of the United States, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You see, as my first act, I would reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, which would make it unlawful for you to dishonestly slant the news in one direction. And since your organization has spent the last couple of decades reporting nothing but lies and crap, you’d go out of business. The FCC would have pulled the plug on you by now, because you don’t know how to report the news fairly.
So count yourself lucky you have a man in the White House more tolerant than I am. But keep pushing. You just might find there are limits even to Joe Biden’s tolerance. Then by law you’d have to report the truth. And that would be something you could whine about from the obscurity of your mother’s basement, where you belong.
Yours very truly,
Robert Harrington
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.