The host of Fox News' 'Red Eye' and 'The Five' takes on detractors and pokes fun at Adam Levine and other celebrities.

Greg Gutfeld. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times / November 22, 2011)

 

By Irene Lacher, Special to the Los Angeles Times

November 27, 2011

Greg Gutfeld, 47, is the host of Fox News Channel's late-night news and humor chatfest, "Red Eye w/Greg Gutfeld." In July, the New York-based TV personality began helming "The Five," a daily round table that replaced departed host Glenn Beck's show.

Let's start with your surprising career arc from men's magazine editor to Fox News personality.

I was a magazine guy. I worked at Men's Health, where I like to think I wrote all the great ab lines, like "Lose your gut." I think that was me. And "Six-pack abs in six minutes." I wrote that as well, I think. Totally impossible, by the way, to get six-pack abs in six minutes. But it's still poetry.

But you had some pretty spectacular flame-outs when you were a men's magazine editor, didn't you?

What are you referring to?

Midgets.

What happened was I was invited to speak at a conference on how to generate buzz. I had originally turned it down because I thought, if you need to go to a conference on buzz, you won't be able to generate buzz. You're hopeless. I realized that was a bad idea, so I called them back up, and they said, "We've already filled it with a guy from Maxim." And I was at Stuff, and we were sister publications at Dennis [Publishing], and I was kind of ticked off. So instead I bought tickets for seats at the conference, and I filled them with three little people. And they brought in clipboards with cellphones and they set them on vibrate. So when their phones went off on the clipboards, they would make the buzzing noise. So in a way I was showing everyone at the conference how to generate buzz. And then a month later, I was promoted to director of brand development for Stuff. But it was obviously a "promotion" promotion. They sent me to an Oakwood apartment in Beverly Hills. It was a lost year. I was jogging on Sunset and getting drunk most of the time. But it was worth it. I ended up back at Maxim U.K., so they hired me again, which was weird.

Why did you want to go from the top of the men's magazine world to Fox News?

I loved Fox News. I'd been on a couple of times, and I found it refreshing. Before Fox News, what was there? There was this terrible sameness — all the same faces with the same assumptions about America's place in the world. The news was deliberately obscuring another perspective, and it was one that reflected reality in my mind and who I was, and the gap between what was real and what was on the news, I thought, was huge. And FNC at least for me filled that gap.

What do you have to say to critics of Fox News who regard it as a tool of the right wing?

I always love questions like that, because no one ever says, "I don't like Fox News." They say, "What do you say to the critics?" In the old days, major media was outrageously liberal, but they owned all the players on the teams, they owned the ball, they owned the stadium. And when Fox News shows up to play, everyone else wants to take the ball and go home. You hear nothing but whining about Fox News because they're kicking everybody's butt. And I love that. The people who whine about Fox News are hypocrites — they say they're totally tolerant, but when they run into someone who doesn't share their assumptions, they say, "Fox News is evil, and it must be stopped."

You had quite a cyber tiff last month with Adam Levine, when he tweeted that he wanted Fox News to stop playing his music.

I have to say that Adam Levine is truly a daring young man to go on Twitter to bash Fox News. He's so rebellious, so subversive. I mean, for a musician, seriously, could you find a more predictable stance than that? He's as edgy as a hacky sack, which also describes his music. So I went on there basically to lower the bar of discourse. If he's going to rag on Fox News, I'm going to make stupid jokes about him.

You wrote for the Huffington Post in the early years, including a mini cartoon series making fun of Arianna Huffington. You essentially called her a hypocrite for not paying writers. How did you get away with that?

I was pretty much their first blogger, because I was blogging from England and my posts showed up hours earlier than everybody else. Once I got in there, it was impossible for Arianna to get me out of there because I was fun mold. If you removed me, the HuffPo became boring and I think Arianna knew that. If I wasn't there, the Huffington Post probably would have collapsed under its own self-seriousness.

Do you have a hard time getting big names on the show?

Not really, because I don't actively look for them. I love having musicians on. I get bands that I love, and they're often not bands other people love.My two favorite bands are now Black Moth Super Rainbow — we had them on — and then Torch, which is this great metal band I love, and we've had them on. I like being an apostle for music.

But in terms of celebrities, I don't care what they think on issues. And "Red Eye" is a topic-driven show. Celebrities tend to live in a plastic bubble all their lives, and suddenly in their late 20s, when they've made all their money they feel really guilty because they're incredibly wealthy. Also they feel vacuous, so they latch onto easy causes like the environment. Even worthy causes, but they attach themselves to them superficially. They actually hurt the causes that they join. I think they lead a stunted existence, where they didn't go through the normal intellectual growth that everybody else has.

"The Five," which you started helming in July, replaced Glenn Beck. How has that changed your network profile, and how are you guys approaching the gig differently?

The thing about "The Five" is that it works. It's kind of neat when something takes off organically. Put five people with strong personalities in a room to talk about stuff that happened that day. Glenn Beck had a single powerful perspective, but there are five of us, so it makes it maybe a little more unpredictable, more of a delicious mess. And they're also amazingly beautiful people, which helps. I have the greatest job — I sit next to Dana Perino, across from Kimberly Guilfoyle and I get to raise [Democratic consultant and Fox commentator] Bob Beckel's blood pressure. I try to turn his face into a red state.

The Tyranny of Meritocracy

By Megan McArdle

Nov 7 2011, 6:24 PM ET 728 I don't care about income inequality.  I care about the absolute condition of the poor--whether they are hungry, cold, and sick.  But I do not care about the gap between their incomes, and those of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.  Nor the ratio of Gates and Buffett's incomes to mine.  And I'm not sure why anyone should.  Other than pure envy, it's hard to see how I could somehow be made worse off if Bill Gates' income suddenly doubled, but everything else remained the same.

But while I do not care about gaps and ratios, I do care about opportunity.  It is fine that CEOs earn many times what their workers do--but it is not fine if some are born to be workers, and others to be CEOs.  And unfortunately, that increasingly seems to be the story in America, as Scott Winship outlines in a fine new piece for National Review:

If you're reading this essay, chances are pretty good that your household income puts you in one of the top two fifths, or that you can expect to be there at age 40. (We're talking about roughly $90,000 for an entire household.) How would you feel about your child's having only a 17 percent chance of achieving the equivalent status as an adult? That's how many kids with parents in the bottom fifth around 1970 made it to the top two-fifths by the early 2000s. In fact, if the last generation is any guide, your child growing up in the top two-fifths today will have a 60 percent chance of being in the top two fifths as an adult. That's the impact of picking the right parents -- increasing the chances of ending up middle- to upper-middle class by a factor of three or four.

That paragraph captures the essence of the problem--and also, why we may well despair of solving it.  How would upper-middle-class parents feel about children who had only a 17% chance of achieving a household income above $90,000?  They would be horrified.  And then they would busily start using the full scope of their talents--their financial resources, their educational skills, and their social capital--to "fix it".  

Arguably, this is just what they've done.  Rocked by the shattering forces of the Depression and World War II (and flush with the prosperity of the postwar years), the old moneyed elites of the Northeast and Midwest did something really remarkable: they voluntarily abdicated their position.  Ivy League colleges threw open their doors to the bourgeois masses, and cut back on the Saint Grottlesex crowd.  The old WASP bastions democratized or were swept away by nimbler competitors who didn't scruple to sacrifice profits because it might look bad to the boys in the club.  First Jews, Irish, and Italians, and then later blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, burst through doors that had once been reserved for the sort of people who got married and buried at St. Thomas Church.  They were joined by the children of undistinguished WASP families from America's small towns, suburbs, and tenements.

The architects of the transition envisioned a shift to a new meritocratic society in which the circumstances of one's birth didn't matter--only hard work and talent.  But that hasn't happened.  Instead, we have a system that has less mobility than the old, forthrightly aristocratic version.

Research suggests that by the time they were in their 40s, American children born in the 1950s should have experienced the same earnings mobility as their Swedish counterparts if the economic payoff for additional schooling were not so much higher in the United States -- and, more important, if that payoff had not grown so much between generations. And educational mobility in the two countries -- the connection between parent and child schooling -- was actually very similar for this generation. Opportunity for top slots may therefore have been as widespread in the United States as in Sweden.

However, evidence indicates that American children born since the 1950s have had lower educational mobility than children in Sweden and other Western nations. And recent research indicates that the link between parental income and educational advantages on one hand and child academic outcomes on the other is stronger in the United States than in other Western countries.

You can argue about why this is--are the upper middle class transmitting real skills, or pull?  But does it matter?  As an editor at The Economist once noted to me, it's actually rather more worrying if what they're giving their children is a strong education and an absolutely ferocious work ethic.  An aristocracy that simply bequeaths money and social position to its children will eventually fall.  And aristocracy that bequeaths the actual skills required to earn more money than everyone else is self perpetuating.  

And self-legitimating.  The old aristocracy was, I think, at least dimly aware that it wasn't quite fair for them to have what they had by mere virtue of being born to the right parents.  But in the new aristocracy, it is rarely enough to just get born to the right parents; you also have to work very hard.  (Higher earning men are now more likely to work more than 50 hours a week than are men in lower earnings quintiles.)  Whatever the systemic injustices, it's also quite clear to everyone . . . even parasitic leeches of investment bankers . . . that their salaries only come as the result of frantic effort.  

The ability of one's parents to confer such enduring advantages is obviously unfair.  And while I don't want to say that a society cannot last that way--obviously, many have, for hundreds of years--I don't think it's healthy for society.  It is hard to get civic engagement, or respect for the law, when the bottom 40% or so feels that the game is rigged.

It's also worrying because, as Ross Douthat points out in the Times, recently, the meritocracy hasn't done such a great job.  Oh, it's easy to cavil--the old moneyed elite didn't do such a great job in the 1920s, now did it?  But I think that rather misses the point: shouldn't the educational meritocracy, which really is very different from the combination of WASP elites and up-from-nowhere untutored operators, have done better?

Oh, I know--you want to break out your favorite whipping boy.  Barney Frank, Milton Friedman, the CEOs of Fannie and Freddie, Ronald Reagan, Alan Greenspan . . . we've rehearsed the list a hundred times over the last few years, and I know you'd be happy to give one more dramatic reading.

But as I think Ross is saying, this overlooks a more important question, which is why the system went wrong.  Don't tell me it got hostage to the wrong ideology--tell me why all those professors we paid millions of dollars to study economics couldn't provide a convincing rebuttal to that ideology in advance of the crash.  Don't tell me that regulators were stupid or bankers got greedy until you first explain to me why tens of thousands of very well educated people, most of them graduates of colleges and professional schools that had aggressively winnowed them based on intelligence, barely outperformed a bunch of upstart micks, third-generation coupon-clipping WASP dimwits, and central bankers who still worshipped the barbarous relic of the gold standard?

The new meritocracy doesn't seem to be much better, on any dimension, than the old aristocracy. It's just more persistent, in every sense of the word.

The real face behind the mask

The name of Steven J. Baum is not known for its charity action. Still, the lack respect its employees show for the homeowners in distress is outraging!

 

The “foreclosure mill” firm represents banks and mortgage servicers who attempt to foreclose on and evict homeowners and it managed to count all the giant mortgage lenders as their clients.

Each year the firm throws a Halloween party when employees wear costumes to the office and the party till noon, and they return to work. Okay, you might say, everybody has the right to party, so where is the problem?

The New York Times published some snapshots from last year’s Halloween party and I got to say they are outrageous! An inside man, a former Baum employee describes the feeling of these parties: “There is really a cavalier attitude. It doesn’t matter that people are going to lose their home.” And the firm isn’t looking to help them to get mortgage modification: their only target is to foreclose.

It is unbelievable: they earn their money by suing these people, but that’s not enough: their lack of compassion for these poor people gets unveiled on these parties. They offend them by dressing as distressed homeowners and making fun on them.

And the photos are speaking for themselves, but The New York Times describes some of them:

In one, two Baum employees are dressed like homeless people. One is holding a bottle of liquor. The other has a sign around her neck that reads: “3rd party squatter. I lost my home and I was never served.” My source said that “I was never served” is meant to mock “the typical excuse” of the homeowner trying to evade a foreclosure proceeding.

A second picture shows a coffin with a picture of a woman whose eyes have been cut out. A sign on the coffin reads: “Rest in Peace. Crazy Susie.”

A third photograph shows a corner of Baum’s office decorated to look like a row of foreclosed homes. Another shows a sign that reads, “Baum Estates” — needless to say, it’s also full of foreclosed houses. Most of the other pictures show either mock homeless camps or mock foreclosure signs — or both.

Looking at these pictures it is so obvious that the law firm doesn’t care about you, distressed homeowner! And they think they can wipe off their dubious legal practices by paying some money.

MFY Legal Services and Harwood Feffer, a large class-action firm, have filed a class-action suit claiming that Steven J. Baum has consistently failed to file certain papers that are necessary to allow for a state-mandated settlement conference that can lead to a modification. Judge Arthur Schack of the State Supreme Court in Brooklyn once described Baum’s foreclosure filings as “operating in a parallel mortgage universe, unrelated to the real universe,” The New York Times writes

A recent investigation led by the Department of Justice over their foreclosure practices was set to silence as Baum agreed to pay $2 million. The investigation found the firm had filed misleading pleadings, affidavits, and mortgage assignments in the state and federal courts in New York. But this doesn’t matter now, as they will pay the amount, which means nothing to this company. Question: will this settlement guarantee the transparency of the law firm’s practices? Will this make them obey the law?