Fox’s The Five show devoted more than seven minutes to its top story, a young Kansas City Chiefs fan criticized for wearing blackface and a headdress.
I’ll admit Deadspin's article failed to rouse much indignation from me about a kid dressing up for the game. On the other hand, I'm not a person of color. Regardless, it’s hardly an important matter compared to, say, the Israel-Hamas war. That is, unless you’re a right-wing propaganda network dedicated to demonizing the left and painting anti-racists as racist.
In that case, you spend 7+ minutes sneering and jeering at the author and anyone who might have been offended and hoping the kid wreaks big economic damage on Deadspin for daring to exercise its First Amendment right to publish an article criticizing the get up and the NFL for tolerating it.
First up was cohost Greg Gutfeld. Fox is just fine, at least publicly, with the fact that Gutfeld called for a race-based civil war on the show. But yeah, let’s go after Deadspin for being maybe too sensitive about blackface and a headdress! Somewhere, Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News host who lost her NBC show by defending blackface, must be grinning from ear to ear as she gets her home ready for her family’s visit from white Santa.
Gutfeld used the “news” to launch a load of hate, with a dollop of love for antisemitic extremist Elon Musk. Never mind that Musk has been promoting the “pizzagate” false conspiracy theory that almost sparked a massacre:
GUTFELD: Can you see that picture again of the side view of the young guy? Are you sure? I mean, are you sure he wasn't dressed as Liz Warren?
…
Deadspin is what happens when journalism becomes too cowardly to confront the woke when it enters your industry. Sports journalism has been plagued by this. I mean, look at some of the great institutions, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, they're now all woke zombies, because they let it in, they let it take over because they were scared.
Instead of saying to the woke, get lost, they opened the doors. And now you have this, this kind of crap. Which by the way, it's so obviously, like, wrong, I'm assuming they must have done it anyway, because they knew that because Deadspin is dying, that this might be the only way that they can get clicks is by actually embarrassing themselves.
Cohost Dana Perino responded by suggesting Deadspin should apologize and send the fan a pizza.
But cohost Jesse Watters wants the kid to sue for defamation. “This guy’s got a lawsuit,” Watters said. “He might not have to save for college.” Later, he advocated suing Deadspin for a quarter of a million dollars. Then he promoted an upcoming interview with MAGA hero and “liberal” media suer, Nick Sandmann for more on the subject. The Outnumbered show continued the poutrage today. I'll bet there was more.
Cohost Jeanine Pirro agreed with Watters. She urged the kid’s parents to “consider suing” because “He’s got to get some reward and damage for this.”
If anyone should know about defamation lawsuits, it’s Fox News. The network recently forked over $787.5 million to settle Dominion Voting System's defamation suit over the network's 2020 election lies. It will almost surely pay millions more to Smartmatic's similar $2.7 billion defamation suit. And millions more to Ray Epps, a man relentlessly smeared by Tucker Carlson. Jeanine Pirro knows a thing or two as well. She is personally a defendant in the Smartmatic suit.
And who better to lecture America about the propriety of wearing a headdress than born and bred New Yorker Jeanine Pirro? "Stop with this nonsense with a headdress and all that, I'm tired of political correctness. I'm tired of people saying what I can and cannot do unless it is offensive, realistically, objectively offensive," she demanded. Yes, this is the same Pirro who hates it when Muslims wear hijabs.
You can see what passes for news analysis below, from the November 28, 2023 The Five.