Matthew Gertz Profile picture
Senior Fellow at @mmfa. Views expressed here my own. Husband of @alyssarosenberg. Dad. Not the GOP congressman, didn't pay for the blue check.

Mar 2, 2021, 13 tweets

I count 85 mentions of "Seuss" on Fox News today as of 4 p.m via closed caption., they've covered his purported cancelation every hour since 4 a.m., saying his name an average of 7 times an hour.

Notably, I don't think they've shown the racist imagery that made Seuss' estate decide to stop publishing those books, just their covers. Which makes the whole scam pretty obvious. If you want to defend the content, defend the content!

My overall take is that it remains good but weird that a major cable news network is so much more interested and invested in this bullshit then the ~$2 trillion relief package moving through Congress.

I spent early 2009 pushing back on ideological nonsense attempting to derail a crucially needed stimulus package, 12 years later the package is nearly three times as large and... they are fixated on children's books?

I've got 139 mentions of "Seuss" on Fox News between 4 a.m. yesterday and midnight, the author's purported cancelation was mentioned on all but three hours of the network's programming.

The coverage stressed across both "news" and "opinion" hours.

Here's Bret Baier, theoretically Fox's top newsman, introducing one such segment with, "The cancel culture going after Dr. Seuss tonight."

Here's Tucker Carlson claiming that "the people in charge" are "canceling" Seuss to eliminate "a very specific kind of midcentury American culture, a culture that championed meritocracy and color blindness and the superiority of individual achievement."

Day Two:

I've got 47 mentions of "Seuss on Fox today as of 4 p.m., with coverage on every single program.

Total of 59 mentions of "Seuss" on Day 2 of Fox's coverage of the story, after 139 on Day 1 (more than an hour of coverage)

Yes, there's going to be Day Three coverage.

My God.

The News.

Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.

A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.

Keep scrolling