Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Sorry Fox News Haters:Matt Groening was just joking

Ustwo · 10-31-2003, 05:35 PM

Quote:

Doh! "The Simpsons" creator Matt Groening may have crossed the line with his comment last week to National Public Radio's Terry Gross that Fox media empire almost sued itself. (Now that takes some talent!)

The story goes that Fox News Channel execs were none too thrilled last year when the wildly popular cartoon, which is on Fox Broadcasting, featured a fake news ticker mocking the station's conservative rep. The headlines included gems such as: "Do Democrats Cause Cancer? . . . Study: 92 percent of Democrats are gay . . . JFK posthumously joins Republican Party . . ."

"Fox fought against it and said that they would sue the show," Groening told Gross. "And we called their bluff because we didn't think that Rupert Murdoch would pay for Fox to sue itself. So we got away with it," he said, proud of the accomplishment.

Fox News, however, denies reports that they ever threatened to sue. "We were all scratching our heads and thought it was hysterical," spokesman Rob Zimmerman told us yesterday. "It's not the first time we've been spoofed, you know."

Maybe not, but Groening told Gross during the interview that ". . . Now Fox has a new rule that we can't do those little fake news crawls on the bottom of the screen in a cartoon because it might confuse the viewers into thinking it's real news."

Nonetheless "The Simpsons" (the show, not the characters) issued an apology yesterday: "Matt was being satirical and certainly there was never any issue between the show and Fox News. We regret any confusion."

I heard the live interview (yes I listen to NPR from time to time) and he didn't sound like he was joking. Perhaps it was the serious nature of the reporter that made it come off that way.