When the cable network VH1 planned a news special called "The New Virginity," an abstinence backer might have felt optimistic that teenagers and young adults were going to get a refreshing jolt of publicity about the option of premarital celibacy. That is, unless you looked at the network's promotional fine print. Words have meanings. So when VH1 promised to explore the "roots of our current obsession with chastity" as it's advocated by popular teenaged celebrities, you knew the fix was in. They suggest these stars just cannot be sincere. Instead, playing to "virgin mania" is just a marketing scheme: "Virginity... continue reading
In recent years, the network news shows have raced by any political campaigns below the level of president, stopping only if the candidate is named "Clinton" or "Schwarzenegger." That principle held true for the U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts. By the time the networks arrived with just a handful of days remaining, Martha Coakley, the Democrat, had fairly well sunk, and there was nothing more to do than the tiresome "bad candidate, not faulty ideology" spin control. In liberal-media offices, the last narrative they want for this year is "1994: The Sequel." Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby was right to... continue reading
When people think of the public morals of Europe, the word "decadence" comes to mind. Sex, drugs, and the decline and fall of the churches all define the trend. Amsterdam, for example is celebrated as "San Francisco times ten." But that portrait doesn't fit as well in Eastern Europe. Take Lithuania, a small Catholic country of 3.3 million people that was forced to be a captive nation within the Soviet Union for five decades. At the end of 2009, their parliament, the Seimas, amended a new law passed in July for the protection of minors. It passed 58 to 4,... continue reading
Mark Halperin and John Heilemann are laughing all the way to the bank at the mess Harry Reid is facing. The hottest backstage tidbit of their new campaign chronicle "Game Change" is that Reid praised Barack Obama's political appeal as a "light-skinned" black man with "no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." The prestige these authors have among their media colleagues was more weighty than the Democrats pleading to be spared the headache. (Halperin is now at Time after many years at ABC; Heilemann is at New York magazine.) For his part, President Obama quickly proclaimed "the book... continue reading
The first rule of dinner-table conversation is no hot talk about politics or religion. Apparently there's a rule regarding the discussion of religion during political talk shows, too. On "Fox News Sunday" on January 3, the panelists had advanced to that light part of the discussion where they focusing on movies and crime novelists. Venerated news man Brit Hume turned to sports, and predicted Tiger Woods would return to success as a golfer. But if he really wanted to recover as a person, Hume suggested, he should consider Christianity. Woods is a Buddhist, he said, but Christianity offered the forgiveness... continue reading
The news that Rush Limbaugh had entered a Hawaii hospital over the New Year's weekend complaining of chest pains triggered a volcanic internet eruption for the hard left the likes of which we've never seen before. If Mt. Vesuvius could vomit in a literal sense, this would be it. This time these radicals let their guard down and showed their true colors. The Twitter lines were ablaze as liberals celebrated the news, news that suggested Mr. Limbaugh was at the very least very ill, and quite possibly dying or maybe already dead: "Rush Limbaugh was rushed to the hospital in... continue reading
It was a year in which the dominant cultural story was the sad, but eerily almost predictable drug-addled death of Michael Jackson. But there were a few good moments sprinkled in with the outrageous and the tawdry in 2009. My choices for cultural winners and losers this year: Winner: Farrah Fawcett. Unlike Jackson, she fought and ultimately lost her battle with cancer with extraordinary grace, faith, and dignity. Winner: "Up." The elite and the people agree that Pixar films are sublimely entertaining. The eight-minute montage near the beginning of this film sweetly chronicling a loving marriage moved millions to tears... continue reading
On December 22, the networks calmly, briefly, and quietly acknowledged the news that the government revised its economic-growth number for the third quarter downward, from 3.5 percent to a less impressive 2.2 percent. As 2009 comes to a close, the media elite are showing enormous patience with the pace of a recovery, without any troublesome talk of whether Barack Obama's dramatic expansion of government is helping or hurting the economy. Back in 2004, when unemployment was 5.4 percent instead of the present-day 10 percent, these same networks were comparing George W. Bush to Herbert Hoover. The government announced 250,000 new... continue reading
Inside the studios of talk radio and cable news, the hot talk about a "war on Christmas" has cooled somewhat in 2009. But the controversies over Christmas, which seem as eternal as religion itself, continue on a number of different levels. There's the schoolhouse war over politeness to religious minorities - and even more unnecessarily, the altogether non-religious. This is the kind where many parents sit through inane "winter" chorus concerts at both public and private schools where there are more songs about sleds and skis than about herald angels and newborn kings. In some cases, students even salute the... continue reading
The year 2009 might be classified as the year Barack Obama came down to Earth. The latest NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found that 47 percent approve of the job Obama is doing, and 46 percent disapprove. Those are not exactly Messiah numbers. And that's the big difference between the public and the press. The media do believe he's God. Evan Thomas of Newsweek has a way of summing it all up. On "Hardball" in June, Thomas explained that while Ronald Reagan was just a "parochial" and "provincial" president of the United States, Obama can lead the whole world. "In a... continue reading