Interviewed by Jennifer Griffin of Fox News at Georgetown, retired justice Stephen Breyer says that he watches Fox every day at 5 p.m. while working out, and talks back to the TV: “I have to hear them, but they can’t hear me”:
Breyer says he watches Fox News every day at 5pm while he works out.
He sometimes talks back to the TV: “I have to hear them, but they can’t hear me.”
Fox correspondent @JenGriffinFNC is on stage interviewing him. pic.twitter.com/kgdWCqTrB5
— Gabe Fleisher (@WakeUp2Politics) March 16, 2023
Three things spring to mind. First, there’s a reason why Fox remains the most-watched cable-news channel, and it’s not that its audience consists entirely of brainwashed, right-wing zombies shuffling around intoning “War on Christmas! Braaaaiiiinnns!” For all of its failings, Fox knows how to put on good television, and specifically, television geared to the sensibilities of an older audience that’s engaged with the news, all the way down to its visual layout, volume, and tempo. It’s the sort of middlebrow programming an intelligent, educated octogenarian can consume and get something out of it while doing something else that requires part of his attention.
Second, the 5 p.m. Eastern time slot at Fox is The Five, which is a panel-discussion show that typically features at least one (outnumbered) guest who is liberal-leaning, at least on some issues. It’s not as if Breyer is mainlining Tucker and Hannity. Then again, talk to him in five years.
Third, there is a reason why so many very old people in our political system find it hard to quit. Supreme Court justices are accustomed to being the ones talking and questioning and having others hang on their every utterance, at least when they are around people who know who they are. There’s a famous anecdote, which might actually be true — I think it may be from Bob Woodward’s book The Brethren, but I can’t locate it in the book at the moment — of one of the justices talking about standing in a supermarket checkout line listening to the next customer argue with the cashier about a freedom of speech issue, bemused that neither of them recognized that a Supreme Court justice was standing right there. For a man who spent over four decades as a federal appeals judge and used to ask “questions” that covered a full page of argument transcripts, it does have to be frustrating to hold a one-way conversation at the television, while nobody listens.