Trevor Noah and The Daily Show staff watch Fox News Channel so we don’t have to — and even in the wake of a profound tragedy like the Vegas shooting, the antics of Murdoch’s on-air personalities provide a measure of comic relief.
At Fox & Friends, the opaque motives of the shooter puzzled hosts. “We don’t know enough about him to hate him yet!” exclaimed one, prompting Noah to observer: “Right. He’s not a Muslim, he didn’t kneel during the national anthem. He’s just a rich white guy who shot 50 people at a country music concert. There’s nothing to hate!”
Meanwhile Fox personalities like Brit Hume and Kimberly Guilfoyle were predictably exasperated that liberals would dare to raise gun regulations after learning that the shooter had dozens of guns outfitted with machine-gun trigger accessories. “Can you please not politicize this today?” they whined. But Noah rolls tape showing Guilfoyle and Hume — and many of their colleagues — “politicizing” the mass shooting in Orlando last year to demand government action against immigrants and Muslims.
And Noah strips the bark off Sean Hannity, who fantasized about what he, a trained marksman, would have done if only the shooter had been in the crowd next to him, instead of 32 floors up and 400 yards away. Even Laura Ingraham sniffed audibly at that nonsense.
At moments during Fox News coverage, it’s obvious that even the Fox personalities themselves found the flow of wing-nut verbiage on the network too stupid to engage. They listen to their colleagues and sit dumbfounded in awkward silence — winning high praise from Noah.
“Dear Fox News,” he emails. “That shit was hilarious.”
