I've been accused of anti-Semitism twice, and I still bristle. The first was after the Buchanan presidential run of '92, which I supported, and which triggered an ugly whisper campaign in Hollywood suggesting an anti-Semitic streak lurking under the hood. The second time, 10 years ago, was a frontal attack. I had conducted a teleconference, involving a dozen or more journalists, to unveil the results of a study conducted by the Parents Television Council involving Hollywood and religion. I learned about an hour later that Lynn Smith of the L.A. Times was working up a story suggesting I'd made anti-Semitic... continue reading
We recently came across a rather new TV network, Me-TV. It's great stuff for old fogies (like one of us) -- reruns of the best of television from the '60s and '70s. "Twelve O'Clock High" never looked better. You probably missed this network in all the TV clutter. Few Americans have ever heard of the cable channel WE tv. Apparently, one way to remedy that is to put on a new show in 2015 called "Sex Box." It's another attempt to "help" Americans with their alleged puritanical reluctance to talk about sex. The Hollywood Reporter described it as a show... continue reading
In some prominent corners of the liberal media, the grousing has begun about President Obama’s habit of hitting the golf course during crises without any concern for looking cavalier. Everyone knows he joyfully hit the links at Martha’s Vineyard five minutes after a nationally televised address expressing his disgust at the horrific execution of American journalist James Foley by ISIS extremists in Syria. He played nine rounds during this most recent vacation in a year filled with vacations. On the front page of The New York Times, they reported “a firestorm of criticism erupted over what many saw as a... continue reading
The amount of mockery presidents endure usually corresponds with their polling. It applies to Republicans (Nixon, Bush, Bush), but sometimes also to Democrats (Carter). In 2012, the Center for Media and Public Affairs found network late-night shows told twice as many jokes about Mitt Romney as they told about President Obama. Was it because Obama was more popular than Romney? Or did it make Obama more popular than his opponent? Obama isn’t running for office again, so there’s no need for satirists to go easy on him at the risk of endangering his electability. The last NBC poll put Obama’s... continue reading
The late media critic Edwin Diamond once notably quipped that to the American news media, “10,000 deaths in Nepal equals 100 deaths in Wales equals 10 deaths in West Virginia equals one death next door.” When it comes to race relations, a similar rule applies. Four hundred thousand civilians have been murdered in Darfur, but one death of a black man in Missouri allegedly due to white police brutality is infinitely more newsworthy. The national media are currently obsessed with Michael Brown’s killing by a policeman in Ferguson, Missouri, just as they obsessed over Trayvon Martin’s killing in Sanford, Florida... continue reading
There was something thoroughly distasteful about that Robin Williams press conference the other day. It sounded wrong. It looked bad. It smelled. Was it newsworthy, so much so that news networks would break into their regular afternoon programming to broadcast live the first official law enforcement press conference surrounding Williams' death? We think so. Williams was not just an iconic American comedian since he burst onto the scene with “Mork and Mindy” in the 1970s, he was perhaps the single funniest man in America. That he would die so suddenly understandably generated interest. When the word "suicide" appeared we became... continue reading
This year’s Senate races are the Democrats’ to lose in the sense that the GOP is doing nothing to earn them, hoping Obama’s political collapse will have reverse coattail effects. The “news” networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC have largely avoided paying attention to the bad political outlook for Democrats in the 2014. It is amazing. What bigger political story is there this year? They even skip their own polls revealing Obama’s approval ratings have sunk to the point they almost mirror George W. Bush’s marks in 2006, when Democrats took over both houses of Congress. The bad-news-is-no-news channels struck... continue reading
At night, the children’s channel called the Cartoon Network transforms into the badly named Adult Swim channel, a parade of juvenile “satirical” sludge like old repeats of Seth MacFarlane’s “Family Guy” and “American Dad” cartoons. How many parents know this? Or know these shows rarely miss an opportunity to sock it to “organized religion” – especially if that religion is Christianity? Sadly, in the second quarter of 2014, the juvenilia on Adult Swim made it the number-one television network on basic cable for adults 18-24, 18-34 & 18-49 and also for males in those age brackets. Its mockery has made... continue reading
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Earlier this year, former New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote a trash-talking article in New York magazine begging conservatives to dig back into the Clinton scandals of the 1990s. Hillary is preparing to run for president again, and he thinks it will help. Rich delighted in “how inexorably the Clintons will seduce the GOP into another orgy of self-destruction” by focusing on Whitewater or Bill Clinton’s sexual harassments, making Hillary look again like “a victim of drive-by character assassination.” While every Clinton scandal is automatically “old news,” even when it's fresh news, somehow Watergate never fades as a liberal-media... continue reading
Back in the 1950s, C.S. Lewis saw chastity as under attack with “all the contemporary propaganda for lust” that makes people “feel that the desires we are resisting are so ‘natural’, so ‘healthy’, and so reasonable, that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them.” You can now safely delete the word "almost." Today virginity isn’t a virtue, but a burden . Chastity is a freak show and anyone who chooses to keep it is a carnival barker. In today’s entertainment world, weirdos – especially sexual weirdos – drive a juicy plot, so virgins are in vogue, as a... continue reading