Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Worse than Ben Lyons - Larry King

I use to do this as a regular thing--just to keep a little perspective, I like to talk about people who are worse than Ben Lyons, or dumber than Ben Lyons, or have done something worse (or dumber) recently. After all, Ben has never killed anybody or stolen anything (unless you count disappointed advertiser money), he is just a scourge on film criticism. There is a whole world to screw up that has nothing to do with movies.

So here it is--Larry King is a fucking idiot. I am watching Larry King Live right now and he has a group of UFO guys on. At first I thought this was an Orson Welles War of the Worlds thing--set up a hoax, get people to go nuts, then admit you are just doing it all for entertainment. Hey, it's New Years Eve, why not have some fun?

No, that would make sense. Instead, in the year that gave us the most obvious and stupid Bigfoot hoax in a field full of obvious and stupid hoaxes, King falls for it all over again. This time it is aliens.

King just said, "Do you think there is a national defense plan for aliens? Sounds crazy, that's up next." Then he asks his guests "Do you think there is a plan for invasion by aliens?"

With crack journalism like this, I understand why Bush got away with invading Iraq based on faulty intelligence.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Woah. Larry, Larry, Larry.

To be fair to Larry King, I don't think he himself believes this is true for a moment.

It makes for an attention-grabbing show and if he challenged them with "This is all a hoax, isn't it?", he'd have nothing to work with on his hands. It would be a non-show.

He lets ALL of his guests off with hardly asking any real questions. When he invites religious nuts like Rick Warren on, he lets them say their piece with no criticism. When he lets someone like Bill Maher on, he lets him go on and say what he wants to say and kisses his butt, too.

He sucks up to liberals, he sucks up to conservatives, he sucks up to atheists, he sucks up to fundamentalists, he sucks up to good actors, he sucks up to bad actors, he sucks up to Jews, he sucks up to Christians, he sucks up to skeptics, he sucks up to psychics.

In a weird way, this makes him actually amazingly unbiased.

Scott said...

No . . . don't say it . . . can't stop myself . . . could Larry King be the Ben Lyons of journalism?

Anonymous said...

Yes! :D

Larry King is the Ben Lyons of film criticism, too! He gives a glowing review to every movie he ever made- or rather did, when he was given a forum to give opinions on films in USA Today.

Every movie was great and "the best to come down the pike". Enspecially the ones HE WAS IN!

Anonymous said...

amen, amen, amen!!