Actor Russell Brand’s hatred for Fox News is so intense he couldn’t get through his eulogy of Robin Williams without taking a shot at the network’s “angry” viewers.
In Tuesday’s online edition of The Guardian [1], Brand tried to find deeper meaning in the death of Williams as he pondered how “we live in a world that has become so negligent of human values that our brightest lights are extinguishing themselves?” Brand [2] added “all around us people are suffering behind masks less interesting than the one Robin Williams wore” and then warned “Do you have time to tune in to Fox News, to cement your angry views to calcify the certain misery?”
This isn’t the first time Brand has taken a shot at the Fox News Channel (FNC). Back in June, as MRC’s Tim Graham [3] noted, he called FNC “a fanatical terrorist propagandist organization” and claimed the network was “worse than ISIS.”
The following is the relevant excerpt from the August 12 online edition of The Guardian:
Robin Williams could have tapped anyone in the western world on the shoulder and told them he felt down and they would have told him not to worry, that he was great, that they loved him. He must have known that. He must have known his wife and kids loved him, that his mates all thought he was great, that millions of strangers the world over held him in their hearts, a hilarious stranger that we could rely on to anarchically interrupt, the all-encompassing sadness of the world. Today Robin Williams is part of the sad narrative that we used to turn to him to disrupt.
What platitudes then can we fling along with the listless, insufficient wreaths at the stillness that was once so animated and wired, the silence where the laughter was? That fame and accolades are no defence against mental illness and addiction? That we live in a world that has become so negligent of human values that our brightest lights are extinguishing themselves? That we must be more vigilant, more aware, more grateful, more mindful? That we can’t tarnish this tiny slice of awareness that we share on this sphere amidst the infinite blackness with conflict and hate?
That we must reach inward and outward to the light that is inside all of us? That all around us people are suffering behind masks less interesting than the one Robin Williams wore? Do you have time to tune in to Fox News, to cement your angry views to calcify the certain misery?
What I might do is watch Mrs Doubtfire. Or Dead Poets Society or Good Will Hunting and I might be nice to people, mindful today how fragile we all are, how delicate we are, even when fizzing with divine madness that seems like it will never expire.
— Geoffrey Dickens is Deputy Research Director at the Media Research Center. Follow Geoffrey Dickens on Twitter. [4]