The New York Times seems highly upset that anyone would question the existence or objectivity of what they call the Public Broadcasting "Service." Last week, the paper put PBS's internal worries on Page One, concerned that pressure from conservatives threatens to send PBS lurching - horrors! - to the right. Liberal lobbyists inside and outside PBS, including the Times editorial page, are once again trying to convince the Congress to allow them to create a massive $5 billion endowment so they may achieve "financial independence." When PBS stations go digital, requiring less space on the broadcast spectrum, they want to... continue reading
Tongues wagged when PBS president Pat Mitchell announced she would resign her high perch at the end of her contract in June 2006. The buzz was that she had been ruined by the cartoon character Buster the Bunny - or more specifically, the episode of the PBS kids show "Travels with Buster" featuring two Vermont lesbian moms making maple sugar. "I've got a long time to get past Buster," she told USA Today. Faced with embarrassment when new Education Secretary Margaret Spellings wrote a letter making the reasonable point that many parents would find this episode of political correctness inappropriate... continue reading
The media buzz over the rising power of Internet weblogs (the "blogs") reached a new crescendo when CNN's chief of news gathering, Eason Jordan, resigned over sloppy charges he made at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. When Congressman Barney Frank suggested at the conference that journalists dying in Iraq have been "collateral damage," Jordan objected. On the forum's own weblog, journalist Rony Abovitz reported that Jordan "asserted that he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by US troops in Iraq, but they had in fact been targeted. He repeated the assertion a few times,... continue reading
It's going to be strange saying this, but I'm going to say it nonetheless: Liberals of the world, unite! I was preparing for a recent interview on a national newscast the other night when the reporter asked me off-air if it was correct to label the Parents Television Council, which I founded and head, a "conservative" group. Next he asked: With which religious movement was the PTC affiliated? When I answered No and None, he seemed genuinely perplexed. It is a cause for mounting frustration that on a regular basis the PTC is labeled, primarily by the national press, a... continue reading
It's not surprising that the biggest names in network news don't spend too much time on the nuts-and-bolts selection of national party chairmen. Usually, new party leaders are well-respected by their field workers in the states, but barely register on the interest meter. On that rare occasion when an ideological firebrand is elected - say, Lee Atwater in 1989 - they pounced on the "controversial" (Willie Horton-exploiting) choice. So where are they now as the Democrats are set to name wild-eyed ultraliberal Howard Dean as the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee? Consider this. If, on the cusp of... continue reading
American parents who grew up in the countercultural bazaar of the late 1960s and the 1970s will recall the rich irony of a mainstream TV media that once refused to embrace the (relative) excesses of the music industry. The Doors made Ed Sullivan furious by singing "girl we couldn't get much higher" on national television. In today's popular culture, millions of children have to watch bared breasts on the Super Bowl before the networks wonder - just wonder - if they've gone too far. The author of the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" was MTV, but they remained utterly unshaken by... continue reading
Sunday's elections in Iraq were glorious for Americans who relish the concept of freedom somewhere, anywhere in the Arab world. The televised images were too rich and emotional and inspirational for the Quagmire Corps in the press to dismiss. The cameras revealed the Iraqi people hiking to the polls in droves, facing down the dangers of terrorist violence to dip their fingers in purple ink and say to the world after fifty years of tyranny that "My voice matters." While our national media were for the most part greeting these images with warm words - after all, who wants to... continue reading
Aiming to set some standard, any standard for decency on television is not an easy business. Trying to cover the issue as a reporter is apparently just as difficult. But it's sad that reporters write stories that lead to ridicule of the anti-indecency "censors," while they feel the need to censor out the subject matter that's central to the debate. See the wave of stories that emerged last week after the Federal Communications Commission bundled 36 complaints organized by the Parents Television Council and threw them in the wastebasket, dismissing them as perfectly acceptable television moments for small children. Unless... continue reading
Turning reality upside down is easy when you live in the world of people like actress Janeane Garofalo, who proclaimed on MSNBC just hours after the inauguration festivities: "George W. Bush is unelectable, in my opinion." This isn't dissent. It's beyond denial. Welcome to liberal dementia. Like so many other journalists in the pre-inauguration buildup, Washington Post reporter Manny Fernandez filed several stories on bitter inauguration protesters. And like the vast majority of his colleagues, Fernandez chose not to give his readers the slightest clue just how kooky the "protest community" was. (Perhaps because these paragons of journalism don't find... continue reading
The latest outrage was a 90-minute reality special called "Who's Your Daddy?" Fox made a game show out of an adopted daughter's search for her birth father. The woman was asked to guess the right birth father out of a field of eight men and earn $100,000. If one of the men who was not the father fooled the woman, he would get the money. Across America, people watched the promos and jaws hit the floor. Fox doesn't care if people are outraged and appalled, so long as they tune in to see how the crudeness unfolds. How crude is... continue reading