I watched the Matt Groening interview on Jon Stewart’s show this morning, and I was struck by Groening comments about a bit of censorship regarding Fox News.  It is interesting in comparison with what I had thought he said on NPR’s Terry Gross show a few years ago.

The show had a parody of the Fox News bottom-of-the-screen ticker, the joke being about you would think it is: News alert — Democrats bad, Republicans good.

Matt Groening described the reason Fox News nixed this as being because viewers would be confused, thinking it was the real thing.  Asinine reasoning, but essentially apolitical, and we’ve heard equally stupdifying corporate decisions over the years.  But the Fresh Aire interview provided a longer story which ran the gamut into the political:

During an interview broadcast today on NPR’s Fresh Air, Simpsons creator Matt Groening revealed that the Fox News Network had threatened to sue The Simpsons over a parody of the right-leaning news channel.  […]  According to Groening, the Simpsons team refused to cut out the segment, which Groening told Fresh Air he “really liked,” figuring that Rupert Murdoch wouldn’t allow the Fox News cable network to sue the Fox Broadcast Network, which carries The Simpsons.  The Fox News Network did back down on its threat, although it has told The Simpsons creators that in the future, cartoon series will not be allowed to include a “news crawl” along the bottom of the screen, which might “confuse the viewers”. 

The story is evolving, if not necessarily in a conflicting manner, a manner that de-emphasizes Fox News paranoia.

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