art credit: HAWK KRALL

On the Radar

Chris Matthews is Ryan Seacrest in a fat suit.

by Steven Wells

It angers me that I know Anderson Cooper’s name. I don’t need to know the name of a bog-standard pretty-boy autocue reader. I wouldn’t need to know his name if I were fucking him. Although I’d probably ask, out of politeness.

In that spirit I’d like to say—fuck you, Chris Matthews: You’re Ryan Seacrest in a fat suit. And fuck you, Anderson Cooper: You got a teensyweensiest bit tetchy with one politician and suddenly you’re the slavering attack dog of TV news.

The truth is U.S. media has its nose rammed so far up the establishment’s ass it sees everything through establishment eyes. Thanks to its cringingly servile reporting of the Iraq War, the lickspittle pack of troop-humping celebrity pseudo-journalists are every bit as responsible for the estimated 100,000-plus Iraqi dead as the criminal gang in the White House.

The best American news reporting I’ve seen was on The Daily Show during the 2004 election. Every time Bush or his stooges lied along the lines of “Nobody’s ever suggested that the attacks of Sept. 11 were ordered by Iraq,” Jon Stewart carpet-bombed the swine with a montage of clips showing all of them doing exactly that again and again and again.

Great satire is not subtle. It is not clever. It is hateful. And great news reporting starts with the basic assumption that the rich and powerful are venal scum who must be hunted down and slaughtered like rabid dogs.

That’s why we should raise the rafters with a terrific “Huzzah!” because Newsnight—a current-events show hosted by belligerent politician-despising Brit toff Jeremy Paxman—is now on BBC America.

Go to YouTube. See Ann Coulter get dog chewed. Watch John Bolton beaten to a bloody pulp by Paxman and then have his guts handed to him on a plate on BBC’s Question Time by the furious audience and fellow panelist, veteran socialist Tony Benn.

“I’ve lost more relatives in the last four years than under 30 years [of dictatorship] under Saddam,” says an Iraqi woman as Bolton sits stunned and squirming.

When George Bush made the mistake of granting an interview to Irish TV, he was shocked to actually be asked serious questions.

So used to the feeble ass-licking they get from the U.S. media, these fanatical right-wing extremists are totally unprepared for the kicking they get from foreign media. And the scum routinely get owned.

Newsnight’s Paxman rips politicians new assholes for a living. He once famously asked a squirming conservative scumbag the same question 12 times. Brit pols hate it but accept it. Americans leave the studio shaking and near tears.

Paxman is a name worth knowing. Cooper and Matthews ain’t fit to eat the peanuts outta his poo.