A Fox News Podcast Featuring Kristen Bell as Mary Magdalene

Tired of reading the Good Book? Tired of listening to the Spotify Version? Well, Fox News has got a podcast for you. In only 52 episodes, you can get the Fox News version of The Life of Jesus. The voice of God is provided by Brian Cox, a Scottish actor with a long career, but many of us associate his voice more with Logan Roy than with the Almighty. What? Was Morgan Freeman unavailable?

But the big contracts news coming out of this podcast is that Kristen Bell (below), who will be the voice of Mary Magdalene had no idea that she would be in a Fox News podcast until she was invited to promote the production on Fox and Friends. That’s because it’s not really a Fox News podcast. It’s an audiobook repackaged as a podcast.

Variety broke the news, but I don’t have a subscription, so I am getting my information from Olivia Craighead, writing for The Cut. The story goes something like this: In 2010, Ms. Bell and the other stars of the Fox podcast recorded a New Testament audiobook called The Truth and Life Dramatized Audio Bible. Cheyenne Roundtree, writing on MSN.com adds that a producer associated with that audiobook now works for or with Gulfstream Studios, which somehow owns the license for the audio recordings and has agreed to license them to Fox. The only new content on the podcast, it appears, is the voice of Fox’s on-air host, Ainsley Earhardt (below), who introduces each episode.

I can’t imagine why Ms. Bell would have any obligation to promote Fox’s podcast, but I also can’t imagine that there is anything she could do to stop them from using her voice. Scarlet Johansson seems to have persuaded OpenAI to shut down its “Sky” voice that sounds like Scarlet Johansson in “Her,” but perhaps Sam Altman just realized how creepy it was that he wanted his AI voice to sound like the AI bot at the center of a haunting dystopian movie. If Ms. Bell makes a big enough stink, perhaps Fox News will just replace Ms. Bell with an AI-generated version of Ms. Bell.