The Cable Gamer has always liked The Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar, in part because she's a brunette, and proud of it, but also because she seems sort of nice and fair-minded.
However, I worry that she is being pulled by the power of her trendy left employer, THP,into taking ever more dogmatic and humorless positions. And that's a shame, because what makes a writer entertaining is a sense of freshness and lightness, as opposed to mere dogmatism and predictability. That's the story, of course, of "HuffPo"--when it started three years ago, it was full of all sorts of heterodox material. Now it is just an organ for certain points of view.
Indeed, it has settled into being just The Obama- Loving/ Hillary-Hating/ Bush-BashingPost, which seems to make its audience happy. (Its audience, of course, is defined as all the people who also blog for it, mostly unemployed Hollywood scriptwriters who watch too much C-SPAN and so think that they are political experts.)
And I am afraid that Rachel is falling into this left-wing rut. A case in point is this headline of Sklar's, "Ouch! The Daily Show's Eviscerating 'Documentary' About Fox News" which appears on THP today.
The Cable Gamer watched the two segments, starring John Oliver, who I count as yet another Jon Stewart sidekick who ought to have his own show. And while yes, the segments that Sklar sites make fun of Fox, the segments also make fun of Oliver himself(take a look at the screen grab above if you don't believe me; that's Oliver himself, painted green, being wheeled into Fox News' headquarters), and, further, make fun of all the bullying blowhards on TV.
Making fun of everything is the "TDS" way. In this particular instance, "TDS" made fun of Fox, but earlier in the same show, as I noted this morning, Stewart made fun of CNN.
Indeed, the great value of "TDS" is that it offers a humorous take on the news--indeed it adds value to the news, by offering fresh perspectives on what people already know. It's a shame that Rachel and her employer are so blinkered that they can't see that.
