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The Five is a program that appears on Fox News where you can enjoy watching four very paranoid ultraconservatives shout down an also paranoid liberal pundit, basically a dogpile of "professional assholes".[1] Like Fox and Friends, it has endured constant mockery from both comedians and liberal blogs due to the stupidity of their pundits.
The show is extremely fast-paced and is obviously set up more for attention-grabbing entertainment than it is for actually educating the public. The hosts have been caught spreading conspiracy theories and woo repeatedly without penalty, and in one of the more infamous moments of the show all of the Republican pundits on air claimed a worksheet teaching the distributive property of algebra[note 1] to schoolchildren was part of a liberal plot to indoctrinate children with the idea of redistributing wealth.[2]
Other wackiness includes global warming denialism on a regular basis,[3] claiming feminism encourages women to commit paedophilia,[4] comparing the debt ceiling to a "wife and her credit cards,"[5] and advocating the idea of taking away welfare from the family members of criminals in order to "lower" the crime rate.[6] Pretty much all of the Republican pundits to appear thus far accept it as an obvious truth that the media is liberal and plotting against the GOP.
The show got in hot water again when pundit Eric Bolling started fantasizing about Guantanamo Bay inmates hanging themselves because it would save taxpayer dollars,[7] something his co-hosts let him go on about without disagreement.
The token liberal, Bob Beckel, is mainly there to get yelled at by the four hardliners. Occasionally Beckel will make a hard turn to outrageousness (usually on social issues), such as when he said he didn't want any more mosques built in America until we know who the "terrorists" are. His co-hosts saw this as a something to cheer for, as he got high fived by a co-host shortly after expressing this belief.[8]
Categories: [Conspiracy theorists] [Denialist organizations] [Islamophobia] [Murdochsphere] [Political pundits] [Propaganda] [Television programmes] [Murdochsphere]