Columnist.
After weeks of indecision, ABC announced on May 12 that it would renew the Catholic-bashing sitcom "The Real O'Neals," which is loosely based on the childhood of zealously gay sex columnist Dan Savage. But then, Noah Galvin, the 22-year-old gay actor who plays the gay son, Kenny, gave an interview to New York Magazine's Vulture blog that was so rude that The Hollywood Reporter said ABC is considering its options, like reducing the number of episodes ordered for season 2.
In the swing of the Trump wrecking crane, President Obama's approval ratings have risen above 50 percent. The media see greater appreciation for his "competence" in office — but, why? In the wake of the Orlando attack it's easy to ask, "How competent would the media have made President George W. Bush appear if an Islamic terrorist shot up a gay nightclub in Florida eight years ago?" It seemed like every piece of bad news during the Bush years was somehow Bush's fault — and proof of his incompetence. The media's attitude toward Bush was summed up in Bill Maher's diatribe to Jay Leno on "The Tonight Show": "The man is a rube. He is a dolt. He is a yokel on the world stage. He is a Gilligan who cannot find his ass with two hands."
The mass shooting in Orlando really infuriated liberals all over again about the lack of gun control — including liberal journalists and comedians. NBC "Nightly News" anchor Lester Holt blandly promoted how "late-night hosts have once again found themselves straddling the lines between comedians and consolers."
The Washington Post defined the old term "high dudgeon" when Donald Trump took away its press credentials for being "phony and dishonest."
It's maddening to watch a movie trailer resplendent with engrossing and alluring screenshots projecting a terrific flick, only to learn after paying the price of admission that you'd watched the totality of the movie's value. That's not misleading; it's good advertising. But sometimes movie studios are just plain guilty of false advertising. The new movie "Me Before You" looks to be an inspirational love story. A lower-class woman in England is hired to take care of a young man who recently became a quadriplegic after being hit by a car. He inspires her to live a fuller life; she inspires him to find the joys he can still realize from his wheelchair.
The most obvious sign of liberal media favoritism is that liberal candidates can avoid press conferences for months at a time, and the media don't complain. After the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was attacked in 2012, the media hammered Mitt Romney at a press conference for daring to criticize President Obama, and then supinely allowed Obama to avoid a press conference. He merely made a statement in the White House Rose Garden to express his sympathies, and then jetted off to a fundraiser in Las Vegas.
Football and its most powerful organization, the National Football League, have faced a serious public relations problem regarding concussions. The NFL settled a massive class-action lawsuit brought by former players (and now, another former player is suing). Retired NFL star Junior Seau committed suicide, and was later found to have shown abnormalities associated with chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
Dana Milbank and Ruth Marcus are both Yale-educated reporters-turned-columnists at The Washington Post. They view the world through the same lens. This sometimes means they can write pretty much the same column. It also means they both have a huge blind spot when it comes to sympathizing with Hillary Clinton.
Pardon us if you've heard this routine one too many times. Barbara Hollingsworth of CNS News reported that the Museum of Contemporary Art in Virginia Beach, Virginia, is currently using government money to exhibit a painting that, yet again, projects anti-Catholic bigotry. They cannot stop hating Christianity (and Christians), and the federal government can't stop funding that hatred.
Socialist media critics always insist that the commercial media cannot be trusted because they are funded by the likes of Kellogg's and Campbell's and McDonald's — a capitalist advertising structure. Noncommercial media are inherently much more trustworthy. They are funded by liberal politicians, liberal foundations and interest groups.
The left used to congratulate itself on being the "Free Speech Movement." It used to celebrate the rebellious anarchists who used obscene words and forced sexually graphic images and conversations into the public sphere. Conservatives were the ones who insisted on decency in the public discourse and demanded regulation, both within the private sector and from the federal government, to protect the public from that obscenity.
The New York Times proclaimed the results of its six-week "investigation" of Donald Trump's behavior with women on the front page of the Sunday paper. It discovered that Trump is kind of sleazy around women. The Times wants us to know this right now — as opposed to six months ago — when it's clear he will be the Republican nominee running against Hillary Clinton.
"Like the amputated limb felt long after it has been cut off, I miss Trayvon Martin," the famous orator said. Who would utter such an elaborate expression of white guilt? Try star PBS documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, gushing his way through a government-funded honor: the Jefferson Lecture, the "nation's highest honor for intellectual achievement in the humanities," awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
President Obama's political appointees are not only celebrated by the media as the best and brightest America has to offer; they are promoted as being so bright that they are allowed to boast about how they masterfully manipulate the press, like sculpting a can of smelly, journalistic Play-Doh. The New York Times Magazine wrote a long profile of Obama's deputy national security advisor for strategic communications — his foreign-policy communications whiz — Ben Rhodes, lauded as "the master shaper and retailer of Obama's foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press."
The White House Correspondents Association throws an enormous annual dinner that's a pillar of the Washington, D.C. power-elite scene. The correspondents hire a comedian and the president comes to be mocked a little...or a lot. Reporters still adore Stephen Colbert for ripping into George W. Bush in 2006, still using his fake conservative idiot alter ego.
Politico Magazine published its third annual "Media Issue," complete with polls of reporters who are perhaps the most resistant to being polled, fearing how they might reveal which viewpoint is ideologically dominant in the press. So, who will these reporters vote for in November? Reporters surveyed were very, very coy. Politico surveyed 82 members of the campaign press corps, and only 12 of them (less than 15 percent) admitted they would vote for Hillary Clinton. Sanders, Trump, Cruz and Kasich drew one reporter apiece.
The liberal opinion site that calls itself PolitiFact insists it's just a fact-checking website. When choosing to assess whether a politician's claim is true or false, their "About Us" page says they ask: "Is the statement rooted in a fact that is verifiable? We don't check opinions, and we recognize that in the world of speechmaking and political rhetoric, there is license for hyperbole." When it comes to humans, there is probably not a fact more verifiable than one's gender. But guess what? On April 26, the website Mediaite carried the eye-grabbing headline: "PolitiFact Rules It's Now Objectively False to Call Transgender Women Men."
At the very end of the April 16 "Saturday Night Live," the NBC skit show mocked the Christian movie "God's Not Dead 2," which, like its predecessor, explores how modern American culture denies the existence of God, especially in our classrooms. It did so by mocking God himself. NBC mocked the idea that Christians are being denied religious freedom. Cast member Vanessa Bayer played a baker who refuses to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple, proclaiming, "I want to deny basic goods and services to gay people." An American Civil Liberties Union lawyer for the gay couple takes her to court to force her to say "God is gay." In her triumphant moment in court, she instead yells out, "God...is...a boob man!"
HBO should stand for History Bungling Office. Over and over again, they have abused their disclaimer that certain films are "fact-based dramatizations." They re-litigated Al Gore's 2000 "victory" in "Recount." They viciously cartooned Sarah Palin's vice-presidential candidacy in "Game Change" without putting up any such disclaimer. Now, they're smearing Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as a pervert and painting Anita Hill as a saint of sexual harassment in "Confirmation."
If conventional wisdom ruled in this election cycle thus far, America's most prominent journalists would have painted the traditional portrait of the candidates. They would show Hillary Clinton and the Democrats warmly reminding the country of her husband's allegedly centrist presidency. Whoever the Republicans nominated would either be declared by the media as too conservative to win, or be utterly ruined by trying to placate those crazy tea party people who inevitably make the moderates unelectable.
