Back in 1964, Lyndon Johnson and his hatchet man Bill Moyers made the infamous "Daisy" ad charging Barry Goldwater would cause a nuclear war, and it became a massive media story. Reportedly the ad ran only once and yet everyone came to know about it, thanks to the press. In 1976 and again in 1980 the Democrats worked overtime suggesting the election of Ronald Reagan would trigger a military calamity, so much so that in their1980 debate, Reagan joked that Jimmy Carter was cartooning him as a "mad bomber." The media couldn't get enough of that narrative, either. So what... continue reading
There was a wonderful routine in the Bozell family when I was 11 years old. Every Saturday afternoon my mother would load her undiapered-aged brood, maybe six of us back then, into the station wagon for an outing to the local movie theater. What a delight. John Wayne and the westerns. Dean Jones and anything Disney. Gone With the Wind, How the West Was Won, Doctor Zhivago. On any given Saturday afternoon, Hollywood laid out the red carpet for families, beckoned us in, serving us some popcorn and a soda, inviting us to lose ourselves, for a couple of hours,... continue reading
On Sunday, October 12, CBS wrapped up its "Evening News" with the apparently charming scoop that Sister Cecilia Gaudette, a 106-year-old Catholic nun living in Rome, would cast her first presidential ballot since 1952...for Barack Obama. That's one more evening-news story than CBS has devoted to Obama's radical legislative record on abortion. Try this on for size: ABC, CBS, and NBC together have unloaded more than a thousand stories on Obama's presidential campaign, and we're still waiting for the first broadcast network TV story devoted to examining Obama's abortion record. CBS's man in Rome, Allen Pizzey, packaged his story without... continue reading
Just like Bill Maher, "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane is discovering that atheist ridicule of Jesus Christ and Christianity draws nothing but yawns from today's media elite. If you want an angry media mob, you need merely spit out "Barack Hussein Obama" at a McCain rally and watch the Guardians of Social Taste bring out the torches and pitchforks. But mocking Jesus? Ho hum. On October 5, Fox's Sunday night cartoon debuted an episode titled "I Dream of Jesus," a play on "I Dream of Jeannie." Get it? Jesus is a fairy tale, like a genie in a bottle. The... continue reading
It seems like only yesterday when Enron and Worldcom collapsed. Throughout these ordeals our national media labored long and hard to paint Worldcom's Bernie Ebbers as the face of Capitalism Corrupted while connecting the dots between President Bush and Enron's "Kenny Boy" Lay, in the effort to demonstrate that corruption in action. Now it is not a couple of business behemoths in trouble; it's the entire economy that is teetering over a credit crisis brought on in part by corrupt government-sponsored enterprises and liberal politicians. So where are those same journalists now? They're out there finding fault only with the... continue reading
Here's an extremely obvious test of how secular our entertainment culture has become: Bill Maher can make a film that strenuously aims to mock all religions. His ads on the Internet shows three monkeys; one Jewish, the second a Muslim monkey, and the third, a monkey Pope. The reaction? Our cultural commissars yawn. National news and entertainment magazines howled at the supposed insensitivity of "The Passion of the Christ," but Bill Maher can't seem to locate an ounce of outrage in all the fashionable places. The film is called "Religulous" - a lame merger of "religious" and "ridiculous." One reason... continue reading
Ever since liberal media types felt robbed by the Bush-Quayle campaign's "lies" about Michael Dukakis in 1988, we've been suffering through the media elite's attempts to "police" the facts in advertisements. "Correction" squads are insisting that John McCain can't say Barack Obama will raise taxes, no matter how much that announcing Democrats will raise taxes is like announcing the sun will rise. In 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle suggested Bill Clinton would raise taxes on the middle class. Quayle said in the vice presidential debate that everyone over $36,000 could face a tax hike. Media "experts" accused the GOP of... continue reading
The temperature has cooled, the leaves and turning colors, and the new fall television season has begun. Enter the mudslide. The Shock and Awe manipulators have been unleashed to air evermore graphic sex and grotesque violence-and, predictably, a combination of the two. The first "winner" in this race to the bottom was the FX cable channel, another sure bet. On September 17, viewers of the appropriately named new series "Sons of Anarchy" were "treated" to a graphic castration scene, complete with hacked-off genitals shown lying in a pool of blood. Completely tasteless programming is in, and FX bathes in it... continue reading
For two decades, going back to the Willie Horton ads of 1988, we've heard liberals accuse Republicans of race-baiting. Throughout this campaign, there have been endless whispers, suggestions, and outright accusations that GOP could/would play the race card because Obama is half-black. Now Barack Obama has found his bizarre version of Willie Horton, and it's...Rush Limbaugh. Obama sneakily tried to air a Spanish-language TV ad telling Latinos that Limbaugh thinks Mexicans are all stupid and Mexican immigrants should all shut up and go home, and that Limbaugh and John McCain are identical twins on immigration. None of it is true... continue reading
As part of the microscopic scrutiny applied to Sarah Palin's record, the public has been told that as the incoming Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska in 1996, Palin dared to ask the town librarian what would happen if anyone objected to an inappropriate book. She merely inquired, but "anti-censorship" activists, perpetually filled with visions of a trash can full of burning books, exploded. At the time, the Anchorage Daily News captured the librarian, one Mary Ellen Emmons, putting up her First Amendment dukes. "I told her clearly, I will fight anyone who tries to dictate what books can go on the... continue reading