There may not be much news in an oath-taking, but Arnold Schwarzenegger's brief inauguration as Governor of California drew more national media coverage than the entire campaigns for governor in the states of Kentucky, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Both Kentucky and Mississippi switched to Republican governors on November 6, a historical feat in Kentucky since they hadn't elected a Republican governor since 1967. But Governor-Elect Ernie Fletcher has never starred in a movie as a killing machine from the future. Last Saturday, 32-year-old Republican Bobby Jindal lost the Louisiana governor's race by about four points to Democrat Kathleen Blanco, the 60-year-old... continue reading
When "Touched by an Angel" said its goodbyes last spring, many TV watchers surely wanted to give thanks to Martha Williamson for offering a tiny oasis on their television sets for the comforting notion that there is a God in the world who loves us. Maybe it's because God help us, almost everything else on television looks like a frenzied dance at the foot of Mount Sinai, worshipping only sex and idols of gold, blithely unconcerned about the daunting prospect of eternal judgment awaiting their Hollywood handiwork. Luckily for us, CBS has filled that hole in the schedule with another... continue reading
National Public Radio is not only a broadcast boutique operated by and for liberals, it's now flooded with more cash than it could possibly ever need, thanks to a liberal philanthropist. Last week, the estate of Joan Kroc, the wife of McDonald's franchising genius Ray Kroc who died last summer, announced an award of $200 million to NPR. Joan Kroc rose to public prominence when she was the first American to donate a fat million dollars in 1987 to the Democratic National Committee. She said she was appalled by "an unwarranted and excessive increase of our military weapons" under President... continue reading
Across America, people who love Ronald Reagan and appreciate the mountains he moved as our leader for eight years, sent out a blitz of e-mails, phone calls, and petitions protesting CBS's plan to air "The Reagans," a vicious, dishonest piece of "researched" character assassination. In response, CBS president Les Moonves did something both unexpected and necessary: he pulled the plug on this smello-drama. It's unfortunate that the network couldn't have assembled the original idea of a kinder, gentler movie about the long-lasting love story of Ron and Nancy. But the ridiculous script that gurgled up through leaks, with fake-Reagan declaring... continue reading
Hollywood starts each TV season with the assumption that sex sells, and it's hard to say it doesn't when almost every show harps on sexual themes like an addled assembly line. Some succeed, some fail, and the ubiquity of sex makes it hard to determine whether sexed-up plotlines play a role. The academic question for this fall season's premiering shows is: when raunchy shows fail, can the blame be placed on factors like bad acting, bad writing, bad scheduling, bad luck? Or do raunchy shows fail because of....raunch? Two of the biggest surprises to network programmers are the dismal ratings... continue reading
As CBS prepared to throw in the towel on its "meticulously researched" fictional hit piece on the Reagans, another network found the imaginative capacity for a much more offensive production. On November 3, ABC "News" - one has to use quote marks here - devoted an hour-long special to a bizarre conspiracy theory based in a best-selling novel. Yes, a novel, and the novelist asserts that Jesus Christ, known to many millions of Americans as the Son of God, was really just a misunderstood married fellow with a child. The novel is "The DaVinci Code," and the author, Dan Brown,... continue reading
The cover of Newsweek screams from the mailbox and the magazine rack: "BUSH'S $87 BILLION MESS." In case that rhetorical punch isn't strong enough, it adds the promise of uncovering "Waste, Chaos, and Cronyism." Today's task for deniers of liberal media bias is set. Please find a Newsweek from the Clinton era with the words "mess" or "cronyism" next to a picture of that president. Since the Clinton foreign policy team rarely risked top-of-the-news foreign policy initiatives (and certainly never wanted to risk an American casualty), the typical foreign-policy cover story of the second Clinton term read: "Mad About Madeleine:... continue reading
If Ronald Reagan were still in his prime, presidential 1980s form, he'd be saying to Hollywood: "There you go again." There are two kinds of films about presidents. There are documentaries which usually try to dwell in factual examination; and fictional movies which have a habit of wildly making things up to satisfy the demands of making either effective entertainment, or effective propaganda. Now CBS is preparing a dramatic and quite fictional miniseries for November titled "The Reagans." CBS promised reporters it would be "meticulously researched." Researched fiction, that is. The last Reagan-fictionalizing offender was Showtime, whose 2001 film on... continue reading
National Public Radio is properly understood, even by the media, as radio by and for liberals, not the general public. As Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz puts it, the media landscape stretches "from those who cheer Fox to those who swear by NPR." The only ones who seem not to know that the left has a massive, taxpayer-funded radio network of 700 affiliates are the liberals trying to sell investors on their own private-sector talk-radio network. A recent PBS "NewsHour" story on talk radio turned ridiculous when reporter Terence Smith allowed liberal-network booster Jon Sinton to proclaim: "Every day... continue reading
The cultural battle over sex education is fought between the concepts of realism and traditionalism. The realists think traditionalist parents are unrealistic in thinking their children are never going to have sex. Traditionalists think the realists are fatalistic in assuming that everyone's kids are going to have sex. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that over a 10-year period from 1991 to 2001, the percentage of high school students who had engaged in sex dipped from 54.1 percent to 45.6 percent. That means that today, a sizable minority of teenagers are sexually active. Regardless of your side in... continue reading