If Howard Dean thought it would be a great idea to heighten his profile by becoming chairman of the Democratic National Committee, he was making a big mistake. Since he was elected to the top party spot on February 12, Democrats have been hiding him like the Clinton staff hid mistresses. They've had big help from a national media blackout. As Dr. Dean traveled the country dispensing gaffe after gaffe, the national networks ignored him almost entirely. On Thursday, June 2, he cracked at a left-wing convention that a lot of Republicans "have never made an honest living in their... continue reading
A year ago I attended the Viacom shareholders meeting in New York. When an investor questioned the propriety of this media behemoth launching a gay cable television network, Chairman Sumner Redstone virtually leapt at the opportunity to defend Viacom's commitment to tolerance and diversity. But not for Catholics. Viacom has no problem whatever insulting Catholics. The Catholic League's William Donohue is America's leading watchdog of all things anti-Catholic in the media and the culture. In twelve years at the helm he's seen a lot of bashing and trashing and believes there's been nothing as outrageous as the May 23 edition... continue reading
There is an unspoken but real impulse in today's media to see themselves as "independent" of America, even above America, not so much because they are superior to America but because America is so egregiously flawed. It is their role to shed light on America's failings. They're not keen at being seen as Americans. They choke at the idea of wearing flag pins. ABC boss David Westin tried so hard to be above America that he wanted to stay neutral on the question of whether our Pentagon is a legitimate target for terrorists. It explains why so many reporters are... continue reading
Webster's Dictionary defines famous as "widely known," but also "honored for achievement," while infamous is defined as "having a reputation of the worst kind," a synonym for "disgraceful." In the big business of celebrity journalism today, there is no discernible difference between fame and infamy. Today's celebrity journalism is only interested in that which is interesting , no matter how vile the atrocity. It will make all kinds of excuses for the infamous if they can be milked for Nielsen ratings points. Worse yet , it will pay the infamous for the privilege of wallowing in their vomit-inducing lives. Some... continue reading
The radical left is not enjoying the 21st century, yearning instead for a perpetual rerun of the 1970s, with America whipped by Vietnam, and the planet in thrall to Third World "liberation" ideologies and theologies. Ah, the '70s, where the greatest enemy of all mankind was not the Soviet empire, but the Multinational Corporation. Instead, the world is now embracing Western-style democratic capitalism. Worse yet, the national media conversation isn't the completely one-sided left-wing nightly harangue that it was in that bygone era. Even PBS and NPR seem far too cautious and corporate for the radicals now. They sense a... continue reading
The riots caused by Newsweek's story claiming American interrogators were flushing the Koran caused many Americans to be amazed by the extreme reaction in the Islamic world. Ken Woodward, the longtime religion writer of Newsweek, tried to explain to Christians just how offesnive Koran-flushing is to Muslims: "recitation of the Koran is for Muslims much like what receiving the Eucharist is for Catholics - a very intimate ingestion of the divine itself." There's a certain irony here. If you wanted to see the Eucharist in the toilet, you needed only to watch the NBC sitcom "Committed" in February, when NBC... continue reading
Just months after Dan Rather and CBS brought shame and disgrace to the entire American journalism profession with their phony National Guard expose of George W. Bush, Newsweek magazine has been exposed for declaring - with nothing more than one anonymous source's gum-flapping - that U.S. interrogators were flushing the Koran down the toilet to inflame detainees at Guantanamo Bay. How many eerie parallels are there between the CBS scandal and the Newsweek scandal? Let us count the ways: 1. Both stories caused liberal media types to hunt for years to prove the urban legends dear to the hearts of... continue reading
No crime is more inconceivable, more horrific, than a parent killing his own small, innocent child. So the story from Illinois of a very evil man reportedly punching, then stabbing his eight-year-old daughter and her nine-year-old friend to death for going out on a Mother's Day bike ride past curfew chills the bones. Can we officially cringe when both the TV news business and Hollywood see this story and silently think, "Ka-ching"? Lisa Marie Presley is trying to make it as a pop-rock singer again by doing a dull carbon copy of the old Don Henley news-satire song "Dirty Laundry,"... continue reading
Last week, President Bush gave a terrific speech in Latvia about the rise of freedom and democracy in the world, hailing the Baltic nations for keeping their love for liberty and independence alive during a long period of Soviet occupation. Then he went further, decrying the agreement at Yalta that consigned Eastern Europe to Soviet domination. "The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided... continue reading
The White House Correspondents Dinner might sound like a gray and boring journalistic event, but for Washingtonians, it's becoming Hollywood Night. Among the celebrities attending this year's DC dinner were Richard Gere, Elisabeth Shue, Dennis Hopper, and Jane Fonda, and First Lady Laura Bush drew rave reviews from the pundits for her comedic routine playing on ABC's trashy new hit "Desperate Housewives." Mrs. Bush joked that she not only watched the show, but she was a "desperate housewife" who took Mrs. Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes to see male strippers at Chippendales, where they stuff dollar bills in... continue reading