Names & Faces
Friday, October 31, 2003; Page C03
The Simpsons vs.
Fox News
Doh! "The Simpsons" creator Matt Groening may
have crossed the line with his comment last week to National Public Radio's
Terry Gross that Fox media empire almost sued itself. (Now that takes
some talent!)
The story goes that Fox News Channel execs were none too thrilled last
year when the wildly popular cartoon, which is on Fox Broadcasting, featured a
fake news ticker mocking the station's conservative rep. The headlines included
gems such as: "Do Democrats Cause Cancer? . . . Study: 92 percent of Democrats
are gay . . . JFK posthumously joins Republican Party . . ."
"Fox fought against it and said that they would sue the show," Groening
told Gross. "And we called their bluff because we didn't think that Rupert
Murdoch would pay for Fox to sue itself. So we got away with it," he said,
proud of the accomplishment.
Fox News, however, denies reports that they ever threatened to sue. "We
were all scratching our heads and thought it was hysterical," spokesman Rob
Zimmerman told us yesterday. "It's not the first time we've been spoofed,
you know."
Maybe not, but Groening told Gross during the interview that ". . . Now
Fox has a new rule that we can't do those little fake news crawls on the bottom
of the screen in a cartoon because it might confuse the viewers into thinking
it's real news."
Nonetheless "The Simpsons" (the show, not the characters) issued an
apology yesterday: "Matt was being satirical and certainly there was never any
issue between the show and Fox News. We regret any confusion."
Trick or Treat
Say what you want about Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel (R),
but one thing's for certain: He loves Halloween.
Two years ago, the straight-talking prankster, er, senator threw on a
John McCain mask and waltzed into the Arizona Republican's Capitol Hill
office. Last year, things got a bit more tricky when he chose Colin Powell
as his subject -- after all you can't just saunter into the State Department
and demand to see the secretary. (Luckily Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage
was willing to help.)
And yesterday Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts (R) -- chairman of the
Senate Intelligence Committee, who has eyes and ears in every port -- didn't see
it coming. Hagel dressed up as Roberts and delivered a photo of him, complete
with his own artwork -- devil horns and a beard drawn in. Roberts, for his part,
was so stunned, he remained speechless -- is that a good or bad thing?
Noted . . .
It's a baby girl (not a boy, as initial press reports stated)
for Paul McCartney and his wife, Heather Mills, who delivered
Beatrice Milly three weeks early in a London hospital on Tuesday. "She
was named after Heather's mother, Beatrice, and Paul's Aunt
Milly," the couple said. This is the fourth child for the 61-year-old
ex-Beatle, who has three children with his wife Linda Eastman, who died
of breast cancer in 1998 . . . Roy Horn -- the illusionist who was mauled
a month ago by one of his tigers during a sold-out performance in Las Vegas --
has been transferred from the University Medical Center in Las Vegas to the UCLA
Medical Center in Los Angeles. This is a good sign, according to his longtime
partner Siegfried Fischbacher, who said in a statement: "Roy is now
making the transition from survival to recovery."
. . . and Quoted
" Ronald Reagan had the biggest heart of any president
in America's history -- so big that CBS had no trouble finding it when they
decided to plunge a dagger into it."
-- Michael Reagan, complaining on his nationally syndicated
radio show about the portrayal of his father in the upcoming CBS miniseries "The
Reagans."
-- Compiled by Anne Schroeder
from staff and wire reports
© 2003 The Washington Post
Company
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