‘COMPLETE BS’

SNL’s ‘Fox & Friends’ Confuses Rupert Murdoch for Alex Murdaugh

“Rupert Murdoch would never murder anyone!” Heidi Gardner’s Ainsley Earhardt insisted in ‘Saturday Night Live’s’ cold open.

Just days after Rupert Murdoch’s unsealed deposition in the Dominion Lawsuit revealed that the Fox News mogul could have easily stopped his most MAGA-fied hosts from pushing Trump & Co.’s 2020 election fraud lies—“but I didn’t”—Saturday Night Live’s version of Fox & Friends aimed, shot, and fired straight at the media mogul—once they got their stories straight.

Steve Doocy (Mikey Day), Ainsley Earhardt (Heidi Gardner), and Brian Kilmeade (Bowen Yang) beamed in from their studio in New York City (“What a cesspool!,” sneered Kilmeade) to discuss, among other things, Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion lawsuit against the network.

While it’s been going on for years now, each of the hosts seem somewhat surprised to learn about it—albeit each of them for different reasons. While Kilmeade was disappointed, given how much he loves “da Minions” with their little overalls and love of bananas, Doocy attempted to clarify the details of the case. Earhardt chimed in to make it known how closely she’s been following all of what’s going on, and how much she disagrees with the legal proceedings.

“This whole trial has been so unfair,” Earhardt said. “They have been raking him over the coals. Rupert Murdoch would never murder anyone!”

While Doocy was uncharacteristically confused, Earhardt continued to fill in the blanks of what was happening for both her co-host and viewers. “They sent him away for life,” she insisted. “Look how sad he looks!”

After pulling up a photo of Alex Murdaugh (cosplaying as Murdoch in Earhardt’s mind), Doocy—ever the voice of reason—explained that she was confusing Murdoch and Murdaugh, which only seemed to embolden Earhardt: “Well we just blew the case wide open—they’ve got the wrong guy.”

Doocy made his thoughts on Dominion’s lawsuit crystal clear when he called it “complete BS” and criticized the media’s decision to share private texts between Fox News hosts like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham without any sort of context.

Kilmeade, for example, got all worked up about a text Sean Hannity sent to Tucker Carlson in early 2021, in which he stated that “Rudy Giuliani is insane.” But Kilmeade knows there was more to the text than that—and what Hannity meant to say was that “Rudy Giuliani is insanely hot. I just wanna lick that head dye off.”

But what would any talk of Dominion’s lawsuit be without involving Mike Lindell (James Austin Johnson)? The MyPillow guy showed up just in time to explain his latest election fraud theory: “Every Dominion machine has a Venezuelan Oompa Loompa inside.” Which isn’t necessarily the wildest suggestion Lindell has ever made.

The comedy sketch evidently got under Fox News’ skin enough that the network emailed a statement to The Daily Beast after it aired, which said, in part, that Dominion’s suit against the network takes an “unsupported view of defamation law that would prevent journalists from basic reporting and their efforts to publicly smear FOX for covering and commenting on allegations by a sitting President of the United States should be recognized for what it is: a blatant violation of the First Amendment."

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Jennifer M. Wood

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