DRUDGE UNLINKED

Drudge Bashes Fox News Segment on Political Violence: ‘Check Your Soul in the Makeup Chair!’

The conservative media titan seemed incensed Monday morning by a Fox News panel discussion that appeared to make light of recent political violence.

Matt Drudge on Monday morning seemingly broke rank among conservative media titans and openly bashed Fox News for its coverage of recent political violence in America.

Drudge, the host of the news aggregator The Drudge Report, posted a series of tweets on Monday specifically criticizing a segment on Fox’s daytime gabfest Outnumbered that sought to discuss how the violent attacks—an anti-Semitic mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday; and mail bombs sent to prominent Trump critics last week—will impact midterm voters.

Instead, as Drudge observed, the hosts spent much of the segment cracking wise.

“Is it really funny?” he tweeted along with an image of Outnumbered co-host Kennedy laughing.

“A segment on Fox News this morning where hosts laughed and joked their way through a discussion on political impact of terror was bizarre. Not even 48 hours since blood flowed at synagogue? Check your soul in the makeup chair!” he said in a scorching follow-up tweet.

To kick off the Fox News segment in question, co-host Harris Faulkner said: “No one should be politicizing what happened this week. We should come together as a country.”

And after a somber monologue from Republican strategist Josh Holmes, pleading with Americans to “understand that we are all on the same team here,” the segment took a decidedly lighter tone.

The co-hosts broke out in laughter multiple times over co-hosts Rachel Campos-Duffy’s family life, Melissa Francis’ comparison of the political divide to being on a sports team and “talking smack” about your opponents, or Kennedy’s quip about being an “unaffiliated” libertarian.

Though he has largely avoided the public spotlight for almost a decade, Drudge remains an important part of the media ecosystem, particularly among right-leaning outlets.

Though his site typically features no original reporting, the site receives hundreds of millions of page views each month, and can drive tens of thousands of clicks to a story simply by publishing a link.

An hour after his original tweets, Drudge added another post, this time including three separate screengrabs of the Fox hosts laughing during the segment:

In a statement, Fox News responded to Drudge: “Kennedy made an unrelated quip at the end of the segment which was focused on unity—there was absolutely no joking or laughing about the events of this weekend and a screen grab of her smiling is hardly indicative of the entire segment. The lower third should not have been up for the duration of this segment as it was not fully reflective of what the panelists were discussing.”

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