FNC Laughs Off Groening's "Urban Legend"
by Marisa Guthrie -- Broadcasting & Cable, 7/23/2007
Fox's The Simpsons has always been an equal-opportunity satire. And with The Simpsons Movie hitting theaters July 27, creator Matt Groening has once again taken aim at a favorite object of ridicule: Fox-parent News Corp.“We love biting the hand that feeds us,” Groening said last week on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. “We love attacking Fox.”
But when the show satirized Fox News Channel—specifically, its often sensationalist newscrawl—Groening says they got spanked and are “forbidden” from taking further swipes at the network “because the Fox viewer might confuse our cartoon with actual news.”
Groening made a similar claim in a 2003 NPR interview, saying Fox News had threatened to sue over the parody.
But the top-rated cable news network says it ain't so.
“It's urban legend,” says a Fox News spokesperson. “While Matt likes to tell that story, it simply never happened. We thought the parody of FNC was funny.”
