Fox News Audition Tape

It really is time to give the Matt Damon interview a break, but I have to make a few comments about this:


OK, first of all, the SOS March was not a union rally. Unions contributed some resources, but SOS is its own deal.

Next, you see the graphic under Napolitano during his intro? "Bad teachers." Says it all, doesn't it?

As to the young Ms. Fields: see how she did it again? "The fact of the matter is that teachers, when they have tenure and they're bad, they can't get fired." She says this even though they can. If you watch the original video, Damon's mother, a professor of education, calls her on this, and she immediately backtracks: "Well, it's very difficult to fire them." You've got to hand it to her; she's absorbed the techniques of Fox "News" arguing very well: say something wrong, backtrack immediately when called on it, and then change the subject. Well played, Michelle.

"Choice and competition improves all areas of our lives." But "competition" requires winners and losers. Are we prepared to accept losers in our schools?

For every Applebee's there are thousands of restaurants that fail. No big deal; build another and try again. Schools are different; we can't afford to have any of them fail. But in Fields and Napolitano's bizarre Randian fantasy, kids could just shuffle from school to school, hoping to find a good one, just like folks out on a Friday night looking for a juicy burger. I find myself amazed that we even have to argue against such transparently idiotic nonsense.

Now, some technical debunking. Go to 2:55 into the video, and you'll see this chart:

Wow - I make just a little less than a lawyer! More than an accountant! Whoo-hoo! Who knew the average architect made less than $53,000 a year?

Oh, wait - it says "hourly earnings." Based on statistics from the BLS. Yeah, I covered this last year: the BLS survey specifically says NOT to use this data to compare teachers' hourly wages to other professions, because the survey doesn't take prep time into account.

As Bruce Baker tells us: compared to these and other similar professions, teachers work 5/6 of the time and make 2/3 of the pay. And the benefits don't come close to making up the difference.

Of course, Napolitano ain't buying, and he goes into a little whine about how hard he works and how easy teachers have it. Well, according to the Fox Business Channel schedule, Napolitano works an hour a day. By the same metric he uses to judge teachers, his hourly wage must be astronomical.

You would think that in the liberatarian paradise Napolitano and Fields want, his salary would be more commiserate with the fact that barely anyone watches his cruddy show or channel:

The latest numbers available, from June 2009, showed FBN with an average of 21,000 viewers between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m., still under the Nielsen threshold, and less than 10% of CNBC's 232,000 for the same time span. At this point, FBN was available in about 49 million U.S. homes.

So much for the free market. But I do think Fields will still fit right in; I'm sure they're looking at this tape and considering her for any number of positions. After all, Fox always has room for a pretty face spouting insane views.