Samantha Bee Goes Off on Fox News After New Yorker ‘Spanking’
The ‘Full Frontal’ host said Fox has ‘grown from a simple old-fashioned propaganda factory into a new kind of television that’s arguably as powerful as the president it created.’
“This week, the Stormy Daniels story came back to haunt Donald Trump,” Samantha Bee told viewers Wednesday night. “But unlike the literal spanking he got from Trump Magazine when he first met Stormy, this time he got a figurative spanking from a much more reputable magazine.”
With that, the Full Frontal host was off and running on the New Yorker exposé from reporter Jane Mayer that, among other things, revealed how Fox News helped bury Trump’s Stormy Daniels affair story in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.
“The unpublished bombshell written by reporter Diana Falzone was pitched to Fox shortly before the 2016 election,” Bee explained. “It’s like the reverse James Comey memo. Would Falzone’s story have changed the outcome of the election? We’ll never know. But I like to think there’s an alternate sliding door-iverse where this article came out, Trump lost, Stormy is chief of staff and I have a new Gwyneth Paltrow haircut and a billion-dollar lifestyle brand selling areola-plumping serum.”
In addition to the Stormy Daniels revelations, Mayer’s piece also “reminds us about a couple of completely bonkers details that we already knew but no one talks about,” Bee added, including the fact that former Fox News executive Bill Shine is now heading up Trump’s White House communications team.
“Bill Shine was booted from Fox News for covering up Roger Ailes’ acts of sexual harassment,” Bee said, “but he wasn’t unemployed for long before Trump snapped him up. Lucky for him, the White House has a strict, ‘You must be at least this misogynist to work here’ policy.”
After recounting how the president reportedly ranks Fox News host on a loyalty scale of one-to-10, Bee said, “Trump is so insecure and desperate for the approval of his TV pals, he lets them sweet-talk him into boneheaded decisions, like the government shutdown and his border wall emergency. He also turns to his favorite network when he needs to fill official jobs, repeatedly hiring or nominating the people he sees on Fox. Except for the time he was accidentally watching the wrong channel and appointed Dr. Pimple Popper as ambassador to Norway.”
“Fox News is such an extension of the Trump administration that the president is closer to Sean Hannity than to almost any of his staff,” the host added. “The two speak nearly every night after Hannity’s show, like a booty call from the world’s grossest booty. Hannity is so influential, White House advisers secretly call him the shadow chief of staff, not to be confused with Hannity’s actual shadow, a perfect rectangle with an aggressive side part.”
“Look, Fox’s bias isn’t a big secret,” Bee continued. “But under Trump, Fox has grown from a simple old-fashioned propaganda factory into a new kind of television that’s arguably as powerful as the president it created. But at least Trump is term limited. We’ll be living under Fox’s influence as long as there’s a supply of fresh teenage blood to keep Rupert Murdoch undead.”
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