Fox News on Tuesday launched Fox Nation, a conservative streaming news service featuring some of the network's most popular right-wing talking heads.
In the 24 hours since its debut, clips of content from Fox Nation have emerged online and they are just as nutty as you would expect - or maybe even more so.
Daily Beast Editor in Chief Noah Shachtman shared one such Fox Nation compilation on Twitter Wednesday afternoon.
Breakdown:
The montage begins with Greg Jarrett welcoming listeners to the "Greg Jarrett's 'The Russia Hoax.'" That leads into Brian Kilmeade of President Donald Trump's favorite 'executive time' show Fox & Friends flashing his sports books as he fluffs himself backstage before going to "talk about history." Luckily, cameraman catches some mean side-eye from a viewer standing next to Kilmeade.
Same.
Next, the tape cuts to Tomi Lahren, the snowy-haired commentator who on Thanksgiving rejoiced when asylum-seeking refugees were bombarded with tear gas, eating ice cream (vanilla, obviously) and beaming over "another successful summer at Armadillo's."
Then we get introduced to Cooking with Steve Doocy, based on The Happy Cookbook which he published in 2017 with his wife Kathy.
"We're not in Kansas anymore," Steve Doocy toasted as he sipped a beer a few feet from Dr. Oz on a kitchen set. A second later, Doocy is holding up a dwindling bottle of Tullamore Dew proclaiming: "this bottle was full when we got here," followed by a brief snippet of Doocy detailing his favorite drink (a lightly dirty Ketel One martini with three olives).
Back to Lahren we go. She was in the middle of a rant: "Apparently tortillas and refried beans aren't good enough for these so-called [air quotes] asylum-seekers, imagine that."
After that, Will Watters incorrectly guessed which comic book character - Black Panther, Spiderman, or Superman - was not co-created by Stan Lee. "Oh come on, this is rigged," he exclaimed when the buzzer shot down his answer: Black Panther.
Remember Mark Fuhrman, the evidence-clumsy cop from the O.J. Simpson trial? "After the trial, I was a violent, crooked, racist cop," he recounts. "And it was hard to argue with him."
Following Fuhrman's blurb and a couple of random bloopers, we hear a Chef Teddy talking to David Webb about riding in a "reality check" hot air balloon as the camera sits on a toy man throned on a fake floating basket.
That segues into a Fox anchor sympathizing with "hundreds of parents" who supposedly complained to him that Macy's was "indoctrinating their kids" by showing a same-sex kiss during the Macy's Day Parade.
Closing out the video was Lahren once again, boasting about how good she is at voting.
"I didn't march in the streets with pink hats," Lahren sneered, "but rather marched into the voting booth and elected President Donald Trump." Yeah, thanks for that.
Quality content.
Those on Twitter who watched the Fox Nation shorts wanted their two minutes back.
This is all too real.
This is not going to be good for anybody.
Case and point:
A subscription is only $5.99 per month.
It was Lahren, however, that drew the full fury of Twitter - because racism is not cute.
Lahren should find better role models.
One media insider noted that politics has become much like a sport, and audiences are thirsty for the drama.
"Politics is the new sports," said Matt Rizzetta, the CEO of social media and public relations firm North 6th Agency. "You see sports media powerhouses launch paid subscription services, like ESPN. The natural evolution is a political media powerhouse would follow suit."
Republican strategist Ryan Williams said "there is a hunger for more content," though it remains to be seen "whether a subscription service can survive."
Other, similar-style programming has popped up before, such as Mark Levin's $10/month CRTV and the free cable channel Newsmax, which have been relatively successful.
Glenn Beck's The Blaze and conservative video outlet PJ Media, on the other hand, never really took off.
Trump has also toyed with launching a state-run media operation. On Monday, he tweeted his desire to create a "Worldwide Network" to compete with CNN, his fact-checking punching bag.
"Something has to be done" about CNN, Trump wrote.
