It's crunch time at the Federal Communications Commission, whose chairman Michael Powell has set a June 2 deadline to make a decision on relaxing cross-ownership rules for TV and radio stations. Those supporting the concept include Powell, at least one other Republican FCC commissioner and executives of the handful of top media properties in America. Those opposing include, well, just about everyone else. From Common Cause and NOW to the Family Research Council and the NRA, dozens of organizations spanning the political spectrum, with cumulatively tens of millions of members, have registered their opposition to increased cross-ownership. Even some media... continue reading
My colleague Brent Baker has a theory to which I subscribe: A political scandal has registered real traction in the public conversation only when it becomes a topic for the late night TV talk show hosts. That being the case, the Gray Lady's in big trouble. From David Letterman's opening monologue Wednesday night: "You have SARS, Mad Cow Disease, the Orange Alert. The news is so bad the New York Times doesn't have to make it up." The New York Times prides itself on producing the news. Unfortunately, these days it can't help being the news. Twice this week its... continue reading
They say that journalism offers the first draft of history. If that's true, we're about to be subjected to a second draft on the Clinton presidency, and it's a draft suffused with all the same Clinton mythology we heard throughout the Decade of Deceit. You know the journalism drill. In the year 1992, America made a bold, intriguing choice for president by electing the man from a place called Hope who felt the pain of working Americans suffering from the injustices of The Economy, Stupid. This was a man with a brain so large it could leap large libraries of... continue reading
How would Hollywood respond if a group were formed a group called Christians United for Repentance and Education (CURE), with a mission to hand out awards for those TV programs doing the best job of promoting a religious or socially conservative viewpoint on homosexuality? Yes, yes: we know that finding programs to honor would be nearly impossible. We also know that virtually no one in the industry would rush to accept these awards. With that idea in mind, now consider the opposite. Consider the libertine lobby that suggests that traditional religion and social conservatism are poisonous to enlightened thinking, ideologies... continue reading
When a major corporation is caught fabricating its materials to the public, rapid disclosure and abject apologies are required. No one requires that ritual more than the major media. So what happens when the fabricators are the major media? The punishment ought to be even stronger. Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post started an avalanche when he noted that New York Times reporter Jayson Blair lifted passages of an article from a San Antonio newspaper. Soon, Blair resigned, and the Times published a 7,000-word review documenting a disastrous flow of flaws and fabrications it discovered in Blair's reporting. Hurray for... continue reading
The Hollywood take on constitutional rights usually begins not with the words "We the people," but with "If it feels good, do it." Its centralized location is the dropping zipper. In the vast majority of occasions that Hollywood's dramatists take up the celebrated right to "choose" abortion, the air is thick with propaganda. Abortion has never been a major topic on the small screen, but when it does bubble up to the surface, the libertine left's urge to sermonize is as hard to resist as the urges that caused the unwanted pregnancies in the first place. The 1989 TV movie... continue reading
George Stephanopoulos and Mark Halperin are soulmates. In 1992, according to Tom Rosenstiel's inside-ABC book "Strange Bedfellows," it was ABC producer Halperin who helpfully handed Stephanopoulos a copy of Bill Clinton's old thanks-for-saving-me-from-the-draft letter. ABC then stayed quiet until the Clinton team could prepare a defense against a potentially very damaging story. Now these two men are major powers in the ABC Political Unit, with Halperin in charge and Stephanopoulos as the top on-air political analyst. When Stephanopoulos appeared on C-SPAN to promote the first televised Democratic debate from South Carolina, he credited Halperin as ABC's inspiration for sponsoring the... continue reading
Is there no frontier in entertainment that's safe from the invasion of mindless reality TV? It's not enough that this stupid genre is trying to dominate prime time. It's not enough that executives are plotting the debut of a 24-hour reality-TV channel called Reality Central, promising that among its new programs will be a reality show about the creation of the new reality channel. Now people are expected to pony up eight bucks for reality TV at the movies. Say it isn't so. But it is. In an attempt to score a quick, cheap coup at the box office, MTV... continue reading
It was a perfectly absurd moment. Patrick Guerrierro, the new head of the gay-left Log Cabin Republicans, sat on a sedate Saturday morning C-SPAN set and declared it was a shame that Sen. Rick Santorum distracted us all from the Iraq war with his hurtful comments on homosexuality. This was not just absurd because the Log Cabin Republicans did everything but throw balloons of blood at Santorum to get the story humming - in alliance with the Human Rights Campaign and other gay-left intimidators. It was absurd because the biggest promoter of the Santorum story was the socially liberal Associated... continue reading
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the artificiality of TV "reality" shows than the hostess for Fox's latest edition of Monday night footsie: Monica Lewinsky. In her new five-week show, "Mr. Personality," Lewinsky will escort red-headed stockbroker Hayley Arp through the challenging task of picking an alleged "lifelong" love match from a batch of 20 men - wearing clunky masks that make them resemble crash-test dummies. What qualifications does Lewinsky have to be mistress of ceremonies? Brian Gadinsky, the executive producer for this typically vulgar Fox masked ball, was blunt: "Tune-in curiosity. We thought she'd be a great choice to garner interest... continue reading