Here we go again.

Slate.com, in their critical role monitoring Fox News 24/7 so that the rest of us don’t have to, picked up on the fact that everyone’s favourite Fair & Balanced (TM) news network decided to mock recently-convicted whistleblower Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning’s decision to live the rest of her life as a woman, via the surreptitious medium of their “let’s go to commercial” music.

 

They report:

Fox News wasted little time weighing in on the Great Chelsea Manning Pronoun Debate. “I don’t do what Bradley Manning wants me to do,” America’s Newsroom host Gregg Jarrett declared last week, explaining why he had just repeatedly used masculine pronouns to describe Manning. But as you can see in the clip above, Jarrett’s friends at Fox & Friends took that stance to the extreme this morning by mocking the Army private by playing Aerosmith’s “Dude (Looks Like a Lady).”

It should come as no surprise to readers that the incident took place on that most highbrow and intellectual segment of the FNC’s lineup, Fox  & Friends. But the slowness of the mainstream media in responding appropriately to Manning’s decision is not limited to Fox. As Slate points out:

Setting aside the absurdity of that clip for a second, it should be noted that Fox News isn’t the only major cable network to decide that it won’t respect Manning’s wish to live out the remainder of her life as a woman. CNN says that it won’t make the pronoun switch because Manning has “not yet taken any steps toward gender transition through surgery or hormone replacement therapy.” (It’s unclear why announcing her wish to “begin hormone therapy as soon as possible” doesn’t count as such a step.)

But who can expect anything more from a so-called news network (CNN) that considers the twerking abilities of Miley Cyrus more newsworthy than the unfolding crisis in Syria?

Sadly, this is not the first time that this blog has felt compelled to cover the inexplicable need for US news channels to make their broadcasts more palatable to a dumbed-down audience by injecting them with lively, and (almost always) inappropriate musical excerpts. As I wrote last time:

Since CNN has probably already haemmoraged most of it’s wavering audience to Fox or MSNBC, why not quit catering to that tiny remaining sliver of their viewers who need their news to be lubricated with frequent doses of perky music, and just…y’know…report the news?

The world doesn’t need another Fox & Friends.

So no real progress, then.