You may remember that it was only a few months ago that Fox News sued Al Franken for his use of the term 'Fair and Balanced' in his book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right". Fox News claimed that they had trademarked the term 'Fair and Balanced'. Well, they apparently were the only ones that didn't see that this case was nothing but nonsense. Even the judge called the charges, "wholly without merit." Of course, the case totally backfired on them, and instead of preventing the sale of what would have probably been only a decent selling book, the lawsuit launched the book to the top spot on the New York Times Bestseller List.
You might think that Fox News would have learned its lesson. Well, apparently not. Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, told NPR's Fresh Air that Fox News threatened to sue The Simpsons over a parody of FOX News' conservative bias on the cartoon. What did Fox News find so offensive about The Simpson's parody? Well, it was a news ticker at the bottom of a fictional Fox News program. According to Yahoo! News, some of the news that ran across the cartoon ticker included: "Do Democrats Cause Cancer? Study: 92 per cent of Democrats are gay... JFK posthumously joins Republican Party... Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple..."
Apparently, the Fox network threatened to sue The Simpsons, a Fox Network cornerstone, if they used the ticker, but they used it anyway. As Groening said, "We called their bluff because we didn't think Rupert Murdoch would pay for Fox to sue itself. So, we got away with it."
As if all of that wasn't crazy enough, Groening went on to say, "Now Fox has a new rule that we can't do those little fake news crawls on the bottom of the screen in a cartoon because it might confuse the viewers into thinking it's real news." What? What kind of idiot would confuse a news ticker at the bottom of a cartoon with real news? Well, maybe, Fox News knows its audience better than I thought they did.