It's late August and someone in America decided it's time to scrutinize John Kerry's life story on television. For a week in Boston, John F. Kerry wrapped himself around a war effort he had spent decades denouncing, and Dan, Peter, and Tom sat around and nodded. No one even considered the possibility that Kerry could be - should be - challenged on any point of his self-serving history. Then the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth came along and shattered that mythology. Without their TV ads, the pro-Kerry media would have spent the entire election year with their collective fingers in... continue reading
Plastic surgery is all the rage, on the television set and in real life. Reality shows like ABC's "Extreme Makeover" and Fox's "The Swan" have made this plaything of the beauty-obsessed rich seem like a middle-class craze. But plastic surgeons have also been fictionalized, in a ridiculous and overwrought way, on the FX cable channel's shock-drama "Nip/Tuck." The show's creator, Ryan Murphy, has declared that it is his goal in life to remove every barrier to depiction of explicit sex on over-the-air TV. He was quoted earlier this year saying, "It's tough to get that sexual point of view across... continue reading
The week after the Democratic convention, two of the nation's three largest news magazines, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report, had fun with two-page photo spreads emphasizing the Democratic nominee's acceptance speech opener: "I'm John Kerry, And I'm Reporting for Duty." But by the morning of Kerry's speech, the critics of Kerry's military tenure at Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were again knocking at the door of the national press corps, pounding on what they insist are holes the size of meteor craters in Kerry's stories of jut-jawed heroism in Vietnam. By now, most of America has heard of... continue reading
Bruce Springsteen has been the darling of the rock press for three decades, first marked by simultaneous Time and Newsweek cover stories in 1975 when he hadn't yet had a big hit song. Two years ago, Springsteen was the toast of rock music again for his album "The Rising," a sober set of songs about the losses of September 11, and Time put him back on the cover. He offered the response the press had wanted: sad literary chronicles of loves lost and hopes dashed, without any of what they saw in country star Toby Keith, oafish flag-waving bravado with... continue reading
Minutes before John Kerry marched into the Fleet Center to accept the Democratic nomination, CBS reporter Byron Pitts pulled out the intimate personal information: "Senator Kerry is a very superstitious man. Just before he steps into the hall, he will do what he has always done before a major moment in his life. He will make a Sign of the Cross, then kiss the St. Christopher's medallion his mother gave him as a child." Aside from the confusion of religion and superstition, there is one obvious question for viewers: how does Pitts know this is true? Even if it is... continue reading
Want a primer on societal meltdown? Then turn on the Top-40 pop station in any town and sample the cultural depths to which too much of today's popular music has sunk. Summer time is often time for young people to take car trips with the radio blasting, off to the beach, or the movies, or a ball game. How many will fondly look back two or three decades from now and say, "I really loved those rap songs about thugs, drugs, and pimping"? Much is being said, and done, about the so-called "shock jocks" polluting the public airwaves with their... continue reading
Two weeks before the Democratic National Convention, Newsweek's Evan Thomas told us to expect the media to add up to 15 points to Kerry's finishing percentage. During the Boston convention, columnist John Tierney in the New York Times asked a sample of 153 journalists to state anonymously whether they thought Kerry or George W. Bush would be the "better president." Reporters outside the Beltway favored Kerry's brand of leadership by an eye-opening 3 to 1 margin. But the 50 or so Washington-based reporters questioned at the convention were even more lopsided, at 12 to 1 for Kerry. That love for... continue reading
Until recently, Whoopi Goldberg could be seen in Slim-Fast diet ads with the slogan "I'm a Big Loser," holding her now-too-big pants out a few inches. So when Whoopi insulted the president at an early July fundraiser for John Kerry in New York City by going on an extended rant ("X-rated," said the New York Post) about keeping "bush" in your pants instead of in the White House, you could understand why Slim-Fast thought their sales pitch had just been distastefully discombobulated. When Slim-Fast gave Whoopi the boot, her sympathizers broke out barrels of high dudgeon about the suppression of... continue reading
It's become a rite of passage for news anchors to show up at conventions and huff that what they're about to televise is not news, but is instead a tightly scripted infomercial, carefully calibrated to create the most favorable image possible for the voters. But when Democrats gather, as they have in Boston, these same reporters sounded exactly like a tightly scripted infomercial for the political left. Just take the first night, when Jimmy Carter and the Clintons spoke. "People were juiced like I don't think I've seen at a convention ever before!" gushed ABC's Charles Gibson. CBS's sportscaster-turned-news anchor... continue reading
It's a rock-solid fact of life that fame and fortune can do strange things to people - primarily because the first perk that surfaces is the freedom to make heinous personal choices. The worst thing about this phenomenon is that these famous jerks are the role models that young people admire and seek to emulate. Last week, the Los Angeles Lakers re-signed their star guard Kobe Bryant to a seven-year, $136 million contract, the maximum allowed by the NBA. Bryant is going on trial soon for rape, but that doesn't stop the Lakers from rewarding him with a massive new... continue reading