Will former White House reporter Helen Thomas ever go away? She's now written up a jeremiad perpetuating the myth that our media are mere whimpering lapdogs of Bush, tinny arfs all around. She hones in on that old, diseased chestnut that the liberal media went all soft in the "rush to war" in Iraq. Helen's harangue appeared in the appropriate platform: The Nation magazine, which advertises on its website the slogan, "If you think it's time to impeach Bush, then it's time for you to subscribe to The Nation." In a preview of her forthcoming book on the "waning Washington... continue reading
Prostitution may be the world's oldest profession, but now, apparently, it's also an honorable one - at least in the eyes of the pushers of pop culture, who have discovered its rebellious charm. One of the films embraced this year by enlightened Oscar voters and film critics was "Hustle and Flow," an MTV Films production centering on an abusive Memphis pimp struggling to make it big as a rap artist. The guardians of the culture have touted this movie as an inspirational story of an American underdog struggling to live his dream, and ultimately and perhaps poetically, succeeding while imprisoned... continue reading
You'd think Katie Couric would aspire to be an anchorwoman for all the American people, now that CBS appears to be wooing her for the Throne of Rather. So why did she have to be so rough on Thomas Monaghan, the founder of Domino's Pizza, for being a Catholic? Monaghan has an extraordinary American story. After struggling badly with his brother in a failing pizza business, he bought his brother out in 1960 and by the 1980s had accumulated amazing riches. He was enjoying them too, all the gaudy trappings of success, and then he read the book "Mere Christianity"... continue reading
It was some six years ago and my youngest boy Reid along with his best friend Mitchy, both three, had brow-beaten me into taking them to the matinee of the "Thomas the Tank Engine" movie. We had settled into our seats, they with their popcorn and soda, and I with the mission of an afternoon nap, which goal I was well on my way to achieving when I was jolted awake by the dialogue in the preview of the upcoming "Rugrats" movie. Scene after scene concluded with a comedic punchline revolving around soiled diapers, flatulence, mucus and God-knows what other... continue reading
Objectivity shows up in the funniest places on TV news. Take, for example, the latest taped message from Osama bin Laden, where the architect of 9/11 spits in America's face by comparing the "criminality" of the American military to that of Saddam Hussein. The TV networks repeated this robotically, without comment. Far be it from them to pass judgment. On the morning shows, they merely passed along Osama's message of moral equivalence, reading it with no attempt to rebut it, rethink it, or reject it. On the evening news, Osama's Uncle-Sam-same-as-Saddam message wasn't treated as a stinging lie about our... continue reading
When parents think about the pitfalls of popular culture for their kids, they usually focus on their younger children, the innocent ones for whom it gets harder every day to shield from an onslaught of sexual themes in everything on television and the radio, including the commercials. Throw in the Internet, and it's surround-sound sex. Even things that some adults might see as relatively harmless - models marching around in underwear in TV ads for Victoria's Secret, or Jessica Simpson tempting a teenage boy for Pizza Hut like she's a mozzarella-bearing Mary Kay LeTourneau - are what others see as... continue reading
Time and Newsweek put Dick Cheney's hunting accident on their covers this week, a dying story already eight days old. The shooting victim, Texas lawyer Harry Whittington, went home after apologizing for all that Cheney had to go through, meaning the thoroughly juvenile media frenzy that followed. Time and Newsweek no doubt imagined Cheney delayed alerting the press until Sunday so that they couldn't put him on their Earth-changing covers last week. We'll show you, they said, fists shaking at being so obviously dissed. But we already know every single bit of the story, having heard it hundreds of times... continue reading
The "cable choice" initiative continues to gather momentum. Increasing numbers of public policy organizations, political leaders, and even telecommunications companies are endorsing the very simple concept that consumers should take and pay for only that which they want on cable television, rather than having to continue subsidizing programming they find offensive or just plain lousy. As to be expected, the cable industry is fighting back, with everything it's got. The problem is that it has very little, and is now reduced to argumentation that flirts with the bizarre. First the industry claimed that technology limitations prevented cable choice. This was... continue reading
Once it was clear that the man sprinkled with birdshot would survive, Vice President Cheney's hunting accident was widely expected to become a late-night comedian's bonanza, a frenzy like Wal-Mart shoppers scrambling for $29 DVD players. As "Today" replayed the comedian clips on Tuesday, NBC's Matt Lauer asked, "Had a feeling that was coming, didn't you?" Katie Couric replied: "Well I mean when you heard the story you just knew they were gonna go crazy with it, so they did." With apologies to the Cheney friend who received the pellet facial, the incident was funny. Now we learn the vice... continue reading
It's been two years since Janet Jackson's so-called "Wardrobe Malfunction" at the Super Bowl shamed the NFL and network TV (for a moment or two) into thinking through how they would deal with a large segment of America objecting to immorality coming into their homes from the tube. The Super Bowl has been the most-watched TV event of the year, every year, since 1995; Nielsen reported that this year's game was the most-watched by percentage of TV-watching homes (41.6 percent) since 2000. In many homes, the whole family is in front of the set, and in the home cities of... continue reading