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Fred Rogers, the beloved host of the long-running children's television show Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, died in 2003. In July 2007, the hosts of Fox News Channel's Fox & Friends morning program — Alisyn Camerota, Steve Doocy, and Brian Kilmeade — aired a segment (using titles such as Blame Mr. Rogers, Was Mr. Rogers Wrong? and Is Mr. Rogers Ruining Kids?) in which they took Rogers to task as an evil, evil man for supposedly encouraging generations of children to grow up with a sense of self-entitlement: The opening commentary from that segment ran as follows: That Fox & Friends segment prompted numerous rebuttals condemning the maliciousness of the attack on Rogers' legacy, such as the following example: In fact, the Fox & Friends hosts neither cited nor identified any experts or studies that corroborated what they were asserting. The single source they repeatedly referenced was a Louisiana State University (LSU) professor who neither possessed an academic background in psychology or sociology (or any related field) nor had undertaken any type of study about the issue — he was a finance professor at LSU whose anecdotal speculations about his students had recently been quoted in a short Wall Street Journal article about Why Young Adults Feel So Entitled: And indeed, Chance later contacted Fox to clarify the substance of his comments: Other commenters also took exception to the characterization of Rogers' teachings as expressed by Fox & Friends: Author Mark J P Wolf similarly observed in his 2017 book The World of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood that: Of course, opinions may differ as to the legacy Rogers' left to the generations of children who grew up watching him on television, but as far was we know, Fox & Friends is unique (at least among national TV programs) in terming him an evil, evil man.
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