Comedy legend and Monty Python veteran John Cleese just farted in Fox News’ general direction.
In a Friday segment, Fox tried to suggest there was trouble brewing between protesters in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, a roughly six-block area of Seattle that demonstrators against police brutality and systemic injustice occupied last week.
The quote-unquote evidence of infighting came from a post on Reddit, supposedly written by someone within CHAZ, that read in part: “I thought we were an autonomous collective? An anarcho-syndicalist commune at the least. We should take turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week.”
The trouble is, the Reddit post was actually referencing a scene from the 1975 comedy classic “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
The scene shows two peasants, played by Monty Python’s Terry Jones and Michael Palin, explaining their society to a befuddled King Arthur, played by Graham Chapman.
“We’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune,” Palin’s character says. “We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. But all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting ― by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more major issues.”
Python fans and news junkies spent the weekend ribbing Fox News for getting played, but Cleese delivered the final blow on Monday.
Fox News’ coverage of the autonomous zone has been alarmist and misleading at best. Tucker Carlson has described the zone as “chaos and craziness,” and Laura Ingraham called it “a Marxist cultural revolution” that hopes to “destroy everything that came before it.”
HuffPost reporter Michael Hobbes, who has repeatedly visited CHAZ, described something much calmer and more community-oriented in a dispatch from the zone this weekend.
The Seattle Times has accused Fox News of publishing digitally altered photos in stories about CHAZ, saying the Fox coverage was “a clear violation of ethical standards for news organizations.”
Fox News apologized on Sunday and admitted it “did not clearly delineate” the splicing together of multiple images from different locations.
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