You Kent Always Say What You Want (S18, E22-400)

Even news anchors have their bad days and enemies.

Plot Summary
The episode opens up with a reshowing of the Simpsons short Family Portrait to commemorate their 400th episode.

The Simpsons go to the dentist for their checkups, but then afterwards go to get ice cream.  Homer buys himself a cone, which ends up being the one millionth cone sold at that store.  As a reward, Homer gets to appear on Channel 6's Smartline (because the ice cream store and Channel 6 are owned by the same company).  Kent Brockman is clearly displeased with the arrangement, but he tries to do the 'interview' anyway, when Homer accidentally spills his hot coffee onto Kent's lap.  Kent reacts to it poorly, yelling out quite the offensive swear.

Kent apologizes for it a short time later, fearing the worst, but it turns out that nobody watched the broadcast because most people nowadays get their news from the internet.  However, there are people that watch TV for the sole reason of finding and complaining about offensive material, and Ned Flanders is one such person.  He finds Kent's swear, and goes to the internet to inform the masses.  The FCC learns about it, and fines the network $10,000,000 for the swear.  This, along with another misunderstanding, leaves Kent without a job.

Marge lets Kent stay with the Simpsons as it was Homer who led to all of this.  One day, Lisa points out the contradiction that is regular FOX and FOX News, which Kent points out is on purpose so that FOX will pay the FCC fine money for their smut, which then gets sent to the Republican party, which everyone in the media knows but refuses to say because of corporate interests.  Lisa, though, offers Kent an opportunity to make that known: through the internet!  On Kent's first broadcast, he outs the media and the Republicans for what they do.  The Republican Party holds a meeting on what to do about Brockman, and quickly decide on a course of action.  Later, as Lisa commends Kent as they walk down the street, Channel 6 offers Kent back his old job with a 50% pay raise.  Lisa hopes Kent will turn them down, but Kent instead quickly accepts the offer.  Lisa is saddened that nobody will stand up for the truth anymore, but Homer reveals that Kent told him one huge secret about FOX, but FOX itself refuses to let Homer share his secret.

Quick Review
We're at the 400th episode now, and each milestone becomes less and less impressive.  This episode was hard to watch through at times.  Krusty's voiceover of the Itchy & Scratchy cartoon was pretty great, but it was really the only good thing the episode had to offer.  As an episode that oddly focused on Kent Brockman, the episode quickly devolved into a message against corporate-owned media and the whole thing just wasn't funny (with a cringe worthy appearance by Ludacris early on making things that much worse), though FOX's attempts to silence Homer at the end was okay.  Its the last episode aired before the theatrical release of The Simpsons Movie, and it leads to the movie on a rather low note.

Final Score: 5.9