Thanks to the historic box-office bonanza of Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of the Christ" ($330 million and rising), the topic of religion is "hot" right now. Still, you get that sinking feeling that for the press, it's just another raging fad like the Tickle Me Elmo doll or the Atkins diet. The other night, ABC's Peter Jennings took three entire hours of prime-time television to explore the relationship between Jesus and St. Paul - and that's two more hours than ABC gave Britney Spears a few months ago. Airing this subject matter - and this much of it, too... continue reading
MTV thrives on its image as America's leading connoisseur of cool, and in election years it tries to make a big show out of adding their coolness to youth voting. MTV's "Rock the Vote" effort has tried to register young voters for more than a decade, but it hasn't been a rousing success. Only 29 percent of 18-24-year-olds voted in the 2000 election, with their votes divided about evenly between Bush and Gore, something surely not pleasing to MTV. In every presidential cycle, MTV airs a pile of "Choose or Lose" specials to match major candidates with typically embarrassing young... continue reading
Tom Brokaw was playing government watchdog the other night, interviewing Condoleezza Rice right in the middle of the "NBC Nightly News." Now the evening anchors almost never do interviews during their newscasts, so you have to assume that Brokaw had something very important to ask. But how could you take Brokaw's questioning seriously after watching him swallow whole Richard Clarke's rotten-egg notion that fighting terrorism was Job One in the Clinton years? The Brokaw transcript read like this: "Mr. Clarke said today that terrorism was the highest priority of the Clinton administration. It was important to you, but it was... continue reading
As the American political system negotiated its way through Richard Clarke Week, there is one overarching political lesson: the national media monolith manufactures the "news" any way it desires, a crude daily sculpting of political Silly Putty. It can make someone a household name. It can leave someone utterly unknown in Idaho. Richard Clarke Week was the latest widget of propaganda from the liberal-media assembly line, designed with an extremely partisan purpose - destroying whatever polling advantage George W. Bush enjoys on protecting the nation from terrorism. Ask this question: if this previously obscure Richard Clarke had come out with... continue reading
Hollywood is filled with arrogant artists, people who feel uniquely endowed by an artistic sensitivity to the plight of humanity. That bulging social conscience is so untrammeled in its brilliance that anyone who questions it must be a paid lobbyist for the military-industrial complex. Exhibit A for this arrogance is the actor and budding playwright Tim Robbins, now wowing the off-Broadway counterculture with his anti-liberation of Iraq play "Embedded," his latest attempt to wrestle the conservative colossus into crying uncle. Once again, he is only making a spectacle of himself. The public first caught this side of Robbins with the... continue reading
It's pretty funny to watch liberals when their political correctness gets twisted in several different directions. One example is the cultural phenomenon of thug rappers. Liberals really don't want to take them on, especially if they become commercially successful titans of cool. Take the thug rapper known as "50 Cent," whose music glorifies sex, drugs, and getting shot, which he knows something about, having survived a nine-bullet fusillade in 2000 in his previous career as a crack and heroin dealer. Despite that streak of vicious and violent drug dealing, he's a spokesman for Reebok tennis shoes. It was laughable watching... continue reading
It's pretty funny to watch liberals when their political correctness gets twisted in several different directions. One example is the cultural phenomenon of thug rappers. Liberals really don't want to take them on, especially if they become commercially successful titans of cool. Take the thug rapper known as "50 Cent," whose music glorifies sex, drugs, and getting shot, which he knows something about, having survived a nine-bullet fusillade in 2000 in his previous career as a crack and heroin dealer. Despite that streak of vicious and violent drug dealing, he's a spokesman for Reebok tennis shoes. It was laughable watching... continue reading
Don't think that presidential candidates are the only political players who can be accused of flip-flops. Take a look at how the media elite have spun the election in Spain. In the year since American and allied forces liberated Iraq, the national media have endlessly planted the flagrantly false notion that America was acting in some sort of a "unilateral" fashion, a lonely hyper-aggressive cowboy thumbing its nose at the entire world. Thirty-four nations may have supported America with money and men and materials, but Americans watching and reading the news might never know, because they were repeatedly told the... continue reading
In the surging surf of the trashy tidal wave known as the Super Bowl Halftime Show, radio shock jocks are a very unhappy lot. Whether it's Howard Stern or Don and Mike, the airwaves today are filled with whining and complaining about the newly restrictive atmosphere emanating from the Washington offices of the Federal Communications and Congress. The shock jocks make it sound like we've entered a Brave New World of autocratic censorship. The House has passed legislation by a resounding 391-22 margin that would, among other things, increase finds almost twenty-fold, to $500,000 with license-revocation hearings after three offenses... continue reading
John Kerry's Super Tuesday wins on March 2 marked the formal start of this year's presidential campaign. This might explain why the liberal media silliness began with the first Bush-Cheney ad buy on March 4. The Bush ads were positive, promotional, piano-plunking, the type that usually bore reporters to death. But this time, they were quickly slammed by the press. The Democrats thought they had an angle to trip up the Bush campaign, and they pushed it. Say, didn't those ads flash about a second of pictures of September 11? Well, yes, and so what? After being attacked unmercifully by... continue reading