Should we feel sorry for the press as they try, frantically, to apply a barrel of pancake makeup to Howard Dean and present this raging leftist to America as a soggy "centrist"? This is a really tough job. The entire political spectrum is going to have to be dragged off to the left of Massachusetts. It's hard not to snicker at the thought of newspapers like The Washington Post declaring in a Sunday front-page headline: "As Governor, Dean Was Fiscal Conservative." Liberal reporter Michael Powell (last noticed in a furious fit of powder-puffing Senator Hillary Clinton) trotted out an assortment... continue reading
FCC Chairman Michael Powell is getting set to be royally humiliated. After announcing his intention to allow the powerful television networks to increase their market ownership share from 35% to 45%, there was an outpouring of opposition. Dozens of organizations, ranging from NOW to the NRA came forward to criticize the planned power grab. An arrogant Powell ignored them all, and over the additional protests of the two Democratic Commissioners, rammed through an expansion of the networks' control over the airwaves. Powell underestimated his opposition. After some 70 high-priced industry lobbyists reportedly descended on Congress, and word went out from... continue reading
In a recent newspaper profile, CNN anchor Aaron Brown is captured trying to be witty as he cobbles together his "Newsnight" show. He asks his co-workers, "So what the hell are we going to sell here?" There's an easy answer if you watch television: failure. For most of the post-war period, the networks have sold us failure. The details change here and there, but the pitch remains the same. Failure to find weapons of mass destruction. Failure to work with do-nothings at the UN. Failure to restore water and electricity supplies even as saboteurs seek to undo every good deed... continue reading
In the same week that Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch returned home to waving flags and ovations of love, Hollywood is sending out very different pictures. It's portraying the U.S. solider as a crook and drug-dealing scumbag. The Miramax movie "Buffalo Soldiers" begins its run in New York and Los Angeles just three days after Lynch's return home. Miramax, otherwise often known as the dark side of the Disney empire, signed up to distribute the film on, whoops - September 10, 2001 - not too good a time to trush the U.S. military. But with the pundits blasting away at the... continue reading
In the weeks of uproar over sixteen words in President Bush's State of the Union address, one thing becomes very clear: Bush is being punished by the liberal media for strategic boldness and a quick military victory on the ground. Neither of these was a strength of the Clinton presidency. This became evident last week when NBC's Katie Couric tried to press former Clinton CIA Director James Woolsey over how CIA Director George Tenet should have looked over the dreaded Saddam-seeks-uranium sentence. Didn't you vet Clinton addresses, she asked? Woolsey coolly replied that Clinton didn't speak about intelligence in his... continue reading
Viacom recently announced that its plan to create a gay and lesbian culture channel, co-managed by the gay-friendly MTV and Showtime networks, has been shelved. Here's one good reason: NBC's Bravo network is rapidly becoming the go-to gay channel. A quick check of the Bravo Web site on July 17 finds promotion for the upcoming dating show "Boy Meets Boy," a gay-male reality dating show a la "The Bachelor," with the twist that some of the "gayu" bachelors are really playacting heterosexuals. The site also promotes their airing of the 1999 movie "Flawless" with this sentence: "Can a homophobic stroke... continue reading
The public gets two kinds of news. There is the unpredictable erupting event, from the great (Berlin Wall falls) to the small (a child goes missing). Then there's the more common type of news, the everyday assembly-line product of press conferences and public events. Some call this "manufactured news," since public figures at the center of the news can orchestrate their spin. But there's a subcategory of "manufactured news," in which the media create a story based on a politcal agenda. Welcome to the so-called Bush speech "controversy." Last week, the Democrats decided to inflate 10 words out of President... continue reading
It's looking mighty weird at the front lines of America's sexual revolution, and the picture's that much murkier given the so-called "news" media's utterly distorted spin on it. Exhibit A: Abortion. Would you be surprised if I told you abortion is growing increasingly unpopular, and the country is moving - no, running - from a woman's right to choose death for her unborn child? Soon the House and Senate will agree to a partial-birth abortion ban package and send it to the White House for President Bush's signature. Undoubtedly there are GOP strategists chewing their nails with angst over the... continue reading
I've never written about radio/TV shock jock Michael Savage. I don't know him, nor do I know much about him. But learning he'd just been given his own show on MSNBC a few months ago, I thought I should explore this new conservative spokesman and what I learned was not good. The consensus, from those who knew of him, was that he wouldn't last. The betting was that he'd say something wholly inappropriate and get himself fired. Worse, the conservative movement would get tagged by his outrageousness. Those predictions came true last weekend when Savage's very brief TV career with... continue reading
It's June 30, an otherwise bland, sunny Monday, and Washington DC area commuters fiddling with their radio buttons are about to get drenched in audio smut again. It's one thing to go looking for gutter-wallowing shows like Howard Stern's. It's another thing when nearly every morning radio show is pushing sex, sex and more sex - and the more outrageous, the better. Imagine you have your twelve-year old daughter with you in the car. You turn on the radio to catch the "Sports Junkies" on WHFS, a 50,000-watt station covering both Washington and Baltimore. What's top sports story of the... continue reading