Most people are looking forward to the summer months - hitting the health clubs to get fit, buying the suntan lotion, booking the beach vacations - and so are the major media. Their idea of fun in the sun is finding weather extremes and blaming them on the impending doom of global warming. Did you ever tune in the network news and think you were getting a bedtime story in reverse? Instead of calming you to sleep, every story seems to tell you of the phantoms under your bed, the ghosts in the closet, and the monsters that plan to... continue reading
At this writing, we're almost halfway through another television sweeps period, a time when the industry puts forth its best programming, which is to say the programming it believes will draw the most viewers. Quality as a standard is absent from the equation. The goal is ratings and the means is ever-cheaper sensationalism aimed at the lowest common denominator. Remember when Ellen came out of the closet? That was a spring '97 sweeps stunt. Sexual schlock is often at the center of sweeps sensationalism, but that poses a problem. There's already so much of it, and so much of it... continue reading
Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle built a little set for TV the other day to announce their utterly unsurprising verdict on President Bush's first 100 days. Thank God, they were just about the last to weigh in with a list of whiney complaints. Not only was this 100-day bellwether a goofy idea, no one followed it, anyway. By Day 93, the network correspondents had taken their marks on the White House lawn to fill out their report card. Their quick take: Bush's poll numbers are better than Clinton's eight years ago, but let's be clear: it's not because people like... continue reading
The impending execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh offers a reminder of how the Clinton era caused a sudden, unexpected outbreak of patriotism. Conservatives, it was said, hated their government, demonized its every action, undermined its tender public image through perpetual, poisonous protests and radio rants. The same people who turned their campuses upside down against "Amerikkka" were suddenly the partisans of "love it or leave it." The arrival of President Bush has returned the political culture to its much more typical pattern: liberals celebrating the ever-magnanimous advocates of exotic leftist and nihilist philosophies. But where once the leftists... continue reading
This is TV-Turnoff Week, an annual event in which folks are urged to, in the words of the sponsoring group's web site, "read...cook...go for a hike...sing...build a birdhouse." It will be interesting to see how many people accept the challenge. And I'd be curious to know how many of them will find themselves able to read, cook, walk, or even talk. (Building a birdhouse is simply out of the question.) The surveys tell us that more than a quarter of America's children watch at least six hours of television daily. But that's not altogether accurate. Just as there's a difference... continue reading
Somewhere in Harlem (if he's finally shown up for work) or in India (if he's still riding elephants), Bill Clinton is having a great belly laugh right now. He pulled yet another fast one on America, and it's working to perfection. After Al Gore lost (and lost and lost and lost) the Y2K election, and with his typical grasp of the rule of law and the niceties of political combat at the ready, Clinton pulled a big set of pranks on George W. Bush. In between last minute pardons for donors, he let fly a barrage of secretive executive orders,... continue reading
In spring, a modern teenage girl's fancy turns to thoughts of...actually, she may not have time for reveries after all. Listen to Annemarie Iverson, who's in her thirties and edits the teen-girl-oriented magazine YM: "Whenever I talk to girls, I am just amazed at how their lives parallel mine. They are so stressed out. They need help more than you can imagine." What Iverson doesn't appear to realize is that YM and similar magazines are contributing to that stress. One of the major points Alex Kuczynski makes in her April 2 New York Times story about these publications is that... continue reading
Richard Gephardt sounded ridiculous (again) the other day. He called President Bush's full budget proposal "a partisan document rich in ideology and short on balance, fiscal discipline, and common-sense responsibility." Let's be honest. Have Mr. Gephardt and his Democratic brethren ever produced a budget that could be honored for producing a spending plan that's utterly free of ideology? For that matter, have the liberals ever been the champions of "fiscal discipline and common-sense responsibility?" These are things one can say freely when truth means nothing. If it is an ideological document, the Bush budget is a mishmash of me-tooism for... continue reading
As part of the February 22, 1994 settlement agreement in a federal district court case, the Federal Communications Commission agreed to better explain how it decides what is, and isn't, indecent broadcast content. On April 6, 2001 - seven years, one month, and two weeks later - the FCC at last released the relevant policy statement. It begs the immediate question: Why did it take the FCC more than seven years to comply with a court order? Answer: The Clinton administration ran the FCC and had no interest, all the grand Democratic Party rhetoric aside, in doing anything to confront... continue reading
It's happened. The man who almost always described Kenneth Starr to his TV audience as a "Republican independent counsel" (hinting that the first adjective canceled out the second) is now an established "Democratic objective newsman." The Washington Post gave front-page play on Wednesday to Howard Kurtz's report that Dan Rather helped raise $20,000 for the Travis County Democratic Party in Austin, Texas. When he was confronted with the story, Democrat Dan had some curious things to say. Rather said he "wouldn't be surprised" if critics use the incident to call him a closet Democrat. "I'm going to get that criticism... continue reading