FOX BUSINESS CHANNEL ACCUSES HOLLYWOOD OF BRAINWASHING KIDS

The Fox Business Channel, which has been struggling to find an identity to differentiate itself from rivals CNBC and Bloomberg, may be borrowing one from its sibling, the Fox News Network. The channel’s anchor Eric Bolling on Tuesday showed a clip from the Disney movie The Muppets in which the villain is an oil baron named Tex Richman. “What’s actually going on there?” he asked conservative commentator Dan Gainor. “Is liberal Hollywood using class warfare to brainwash our kids?” Replied Gainor, “Hollywood, they hate the oil industry. They hate corporate America.” (Actually, the ruthless oligarch has been a staple of fiction — even of works by conservative writers — long before movies were invented.) Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood blog joined in. “In Hollywood, daring to cast a Muslim character [as a villain] can be considered a hate crime, but repeatedly casting businessmen, Christians and Southerners as villains is enlightened. The Muppets’ choice of villains is fair fodder for debate, especially since it’s hardly the first children’s film which eagerly inserted liberal messages into its story.” (Oddly, a highly positive review of the movie appears on the Big Hollywood site. It concludes with praise for writer/director Jason Segal, who, it says, “helped bring some old friends back to the big screen with all their humor and integrity intact.”)