Fox Host Says Anti-Corporate Muppets are Brainwashing Children

By Josh Voorhees, Slate

05 December 11

Follow the Money's Eric Bolling equates the new movie with anti-corporate propaganda.

he Muppets are a bunch of tree-hugging commies who are trying to brainwash Americans children to hate big business.

At least that's the case according to Fox Business' Eric Bolling, who has some corners of the Web abuzz this week after he offered a rather critical take of the Muppets' new movie. The Follow the Money host brought the issue up last week during a segment on his show, during which he interviewed the conservative Media Research Center's Dan Gainor. The like-minded pair took turns pointing out what they say was the movie's, in specific, and Hollywood's, in general, overtly partisan take on the world.

Bolling and Gainor's issues with The Muppets stems from the fact that its plot centers on the heroes' bid to prevent an evil oil tycoon - with the less-than-nuanced name of Tex Richman - from tearing down the Muppets' beloved theater to drill for oil.

That narrative decision, according to Gainor, was the latest example of a Hollywood production unfairly making the oil industry the villain. After name-dropping such films as Syriana and Cars 2, he offered this take on the benefits of carbon-based fuels that he says the movie industry avoids: "None of [the movies] remind people what oil means for most people, which is fuel to light a hospital or heat your home or maybe fuel an ambulance to get you to a hospital if you need that. They don't want to tell that story."

There's plenty more from where that came from in the video clip (which Fox News watchdog Media Matters has here), including an attempt to tie what Bolling and Gainor see as Hollywood's anti-corporate message to the recent Occupy Wall Street movement. (Most of the pull-quotes came from Gainor but, as you'll see in the video, Bolling clearly led the way with his questions and his own comments.)

"This is what they're teaching our kids." Gainor said. "You wonder why we've got a bunch of Occupy Wall Street people walking all around the country. They've been indoctrinated, literally, for years by this kind of stuff. Whether it was Captain Planet or Nickelodeon's Big Green Help or The Day After Tomorrow, the Al Gore-influenced movie, all of that is what they're teaching, is that corporations are bad, the oil industry is bad, and ultimately what they're telling kids is what they told you in the movie The Matrix, that mankind is a virus on poor, old Mother Earth."

The Washington Post points out one of the problems with the specific argument against the The Muppets: "Environmentalism wasn't mentioned in the movie. The Muppets save their theater because it's a landmark and their historical home - not because they're trying to hinder the oil industry's progress, or save the planet."

From the December 2 edition of Fox Business' Follow the Money