Columnist.
Here's one obvious sign that we live in a profane world. "Fifty Shades of Grey," the "mommy-porn" book turned into a movie, complete with its whips and chains and erotic punishment, debuted to far less controversy than "The Passion of the Christ" in 2004. The media toasted "Fifty Shades" as the biggest February movie opening weekend ever at $83.8 million, just a shade more than "The Passion." But Mel Gibson's Jesus film debuted on Ash Wednesday, not on Friday. According to BoxOfficeMojo.com, in its first five days, "The Passion" grossed $125.5 million; "Fifty Shades" stood at $98.5 million. It received a lousy C-plus CinemaScore from audiences, so its ticket sales may begin to trail off.
The safest bet you can possibly make at the beginning of a presidential election cycle is that the "objective" national media will savage the Republican contenders with "investigative" journalism. Not just one Republican contender, but all the Republican contenders. It's a bit amazing to look back at 2012 and remember that every Republican candidate was punched in the kisser by "journalism" if and when he or she inched into the lead. Sarah Palin never declared, but she was slimed in 2011 by NBC star Savannah Guthrie, who casually tossed out author Joe McGinniss's claims that she was a bad mother, that she and her husband used cocaine, and she had sex with an NBA star. Proof? Who needs it?
Brian Williams' six-month suspension has fallen flat. His critics aren't mollified. His supporters are clearly dispirited. Everyone knows this one is not over -- though his tenure at NBC may very well be done. The suspension isn't going to work for the same reason his apology went nowhere. It resolves nothing. Hubris. So many celebrities -- be they politicians, journalists, artists -- refuse to accept that the cover-up and obfuscation is always worse than the crime. Time and again, when honesty and humility beckon, they are nowhere to be found. So it was with Richard Nixon. Had he accepted personal responsibility, immediately, and then taken the steps, immediately, to investigate and resolve the matter, there would have been no Watergate scandal marring his legacy.
Brian Williams has ruled the roost at "NBC Nightly News" for more than 10 years. Right before he took over, he saw Dan Rather's career go up in flames at CBS over phony National Guard documents marshaled against President Bush. The anchorman's career has imploded for another reason. He seemingly can't stop telling falsehoods about himself. He was in Iraq reporting during the war and certainly had powerful copy, with visuals, to present -- but it wasn't enough. He had to embellish, from one audience to the next.
Republican presidential candidates usually avoid any criticism of Hollywood, ever since Vice President Dan Quayle attacked "Murphy Brown" in 1992 for choosing to be a single mother on TV. There are two reasons. The first is the "objective" media will hand you your head, as Quayle found out -- even if later, experts and even reporters themselves admitted Quayle was right about the social harm being caused by the glorification of single motherhood. The second is a version of the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) Syndrome. Just as Americans despise Congress, but not their own Congressman, so, too, do they deplore Hollywood's decadence while admiring their favorite performer, no matter how decadent. Mike Huckabee, the once and future presidential candidate, is finding this out all over again for attacking Beyonce and her gangsta-rap husband Jay-Z in his new book "God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy."
The press has barely noticed that President Obama has offered a new federal budget. Even in its paucity was a slant to be found. Like an obedient servant, NBC morning anchor Natalie Morales relayed: "President Obama, unveiling a record $4 trillion budget on Monday aimed at helping the poor and middle class. President Obama says the budget is practical, not partisan." David Nakamura of The Washington Post began a story on the Obama budget sounding slightly less servile. He described it as "a bet that the country has moved closer to his way of thinking just three months after an election in which both he and his party were roundly rejected by the voters."
The Academy Awards is meant to be the world's most prestigious honors for achievement in movies. Politics should have nothing to do with it, but, increasingly, that's not so. Hollywood is now regularly treading beyond "artistic excellence" and letting political overtones sway the outcome. For months now the "diversity" crowd has wailed and gnashed its teeth over the lack of Oscar interest in "Selma," as if Hollywood harbors a racist underbelly. They will not accept that maybe the movie wasn't *that* good. Even worse, they won't accept that the studio executives at Paramount stupidly screwed up by not sending DVD screeners to all the Oscar voters. But older culture watchers remember 1985, when "The Color Purple" with a largely black cast went from a potential Oscar sweep of 11 nominations to an Oscar shutout -- zero statues. Why? Activists like the Coalition Against Black Exploitation charged that the film "exacerbates the current schism between black males and females, degrades both sexes and portrays the black family in an exceedingly negative light to the world at large." Art took a backseat to politics.
Hundreds of thousands of protesters descend on Washington every January to "March for Life," protesting the horror of more than a million abortions in America every year. Every year the "news" outlets report next to nothing, even when their reporters are there documenting the event as their cameras film it. This year, the turnout was among the strongest ever, with estimates as high as half a million people. The visual of wave after wave marching to the Capitol to demand action, with banners, flyers and flags; with an ocean of those supposedly disinterested millennial cheering and praying; with babies everywhere. It was a breathtaking sight. Except virtually no one watching the networks ever saw it. CBS gave the story a paltry 15 seconds. NBC "News" blacked it out entirely. So too did ABC "News."
Clint Eastwood's movie "American Sniper" dominated the box office race over the long Martin Luther King weekend with a gross of $103.5 million. That's more than twice as high as the previous January opening weekend record. It received a rare "A+" CinemaScore from people who saw it, suggesting word-of-mouth will be wildly positive. This movie wasn't very controversial -- until, that is, the film earned six Oscar nominations and had that amazing weekend at the box office. That's when the hostility erupted from leftist Hollywood types on Twitter, hell-bent on pushing back against the wave. Radical director Michael Moore slammed American snipers in general on Twitter: "My uncle killed by sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards. Will shoot u in the back. Snipers aren't heroes." Moore hasn't made a real movie in six years. He sounded almost desperate for attention.
When the Golden Globe awards telecast was over, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation proclaimed, "It was a great night for LGBT-inclusive television." They could have added: "We run the joint." Gay actor Matt Bomer thanked his "husband" and his surrogate sons when he won an award for HBO's Reagan-bashing AIDS drama "The Normal Heart." But the bigger celebration came with a best actor award to Jeffrey Tambor, who plays Mort, a 70-year-old father of three who decides he's a woman named Maura in a show called "Transparent," or literally, "Trans Parent," since his three adult children have to figure this whole scene out. The show "airs" on Amazon.com.
When America was hit on 9/11, the world united around us. France just had its 9/11, and again the civilized world has come together, all except the United States. Where were America's leaders as the rest of the world united? The reaction to Islamic terrorists killing 17 people in Paris in the name of their radical creed has been greeted with a very strange perceived need to deflect or just dismiss it in liberal political and media circles. Most journalists tried to downplay or ignore Obama's failure to attend the huge Sunday "unity" rally in Paris, where 40 world leaders gathered in a show of support for France. While the New York tabloids mocked Obama, most national newspapers mentioned "World leaders link arms" and barely noticed the leader of the free world had stayed home to watch football games.
Ask anyone under 40 to identify Paul McCartney or "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and the odds are you'll get a blank look in return. Ask someone under 30 to describe the Soviet menace and you may well get the same response. The first one is harmless ignorance, and some might argue the second one is as well. After all, it's over and we won, right? What's not harmless is a never-ending effort to glorify communist conspirators in Hollywood, like the forthcoming movie "Trumbo," starring "Breaking Bad" star Bryan Cranston as blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. Entertainment Weekly magazine spewed the usual leftist apologist narrative: "Trumbo -- who had been a member of the Communist party during World War II when the Soviets were a major American ally -- was punished for his principled stand for free speech and the Constitution."
During the Christmas season, the national media hoped to once again dip the entire Republican Party in the mire of David Duke and other racists, to spread that taint across the political landscape. Republicans fought back with Obama's long association with his racist Reverend Jeremiah Wright, which the media worked hard to erase as utterly irrelevant. But here's someone who hasn't been removed from the spotlight around Obama. We recently found an amazing video The New York Times made about Al Sharpton, the unrepentant racial hoax-exploiter. Sharpton has never suffered from ruining reputations and causing strife over teenager Tawana Brawley's made-up stories of rape and racist mistreatment at the hands of white cops in the late 1980s.
At this point in George W. Bush's presidency, Hollywood uncorked a barrel of anti-Iraq-war movies, all of them in their varying styles trashing the American military or intelligence agencies as vicious murderers, rapists and all-around freedom-tramplers. Most were duds because the public wanted nothing to do with those messages. But oh, did the critics love 'em. In Obama's "fourth quarter," as he calls it, Clint Eastwood has released his movie "American Sniper," starring Bradley Cooper as Chris Kyle, a NAVY Seal who survived four tours of duty in Iraq and was credited with an astonishing 160 confirmed kills. The story ended horribly in 2013, four years after he left the Navy, when he and a friend were shot down at a Texas shooting range. Oh, how the critics hate it.
In the fall of 2007, President Bush offered an interview on race relations to National Public Radio correspondent Juan Williams, but NPR declined the invitation. Ellen Weiss, the news boss at the time (who was deposed in the controversy after she fired Williams three years later), demanded that an NPR anchor do the interview. The Williams interview with the president aired on Fox News, and not on NPR. That sense of feisty independence does not extend to President Obama. When he grants an interview to an NPR anchor, it has all the dramatic tension and hostility of a cappuccino klatch with the D.C. Young Democrats.
Looking back at our popular culture in 2014, it appears that Hollywood's power is on the wane. Politically, the leftist celebrities and the "Rock the Vote" gang couldn't help dig the Democrats out of their rut. Even that paragon of permissiveness Sandra Fluke couldn't exploit her Limbaugh-victim aura to win a state Senate seat in libertine California. The year's biggest loser was Sony, which looked pathetically powerless in the wake of an alleged North Korea's hack attack. Worst yet were the people involved. A clearly frustrated George Clooney announced there was no one in that industry willing to sign a letter condemning Sony's capitulation. Clooney may be A-list, but that's apparently no match for Tinseltown's cowardice.
Historians will record that 2014 was a terrible year for liberal Democrats, not just at the polls but also in the news. The networks spent most of the fall campaign pretending there wasn't a fall campaign, and for good reason. Obama's Hope and Change aura had completely sunk into the muck as Obama's honesty and competence both took a hit in the hard news of ISIS and Ebola. But if Team Obama was going down, the journalistic elite were going down with him. They are cemented with their so-called savior, as can be seen in the Media Research Center's "Worst of the Worst 2014," marking the worst quotes gathered from media coverage this year. A panel of 40 opinion leaders selected the most ridiculous verbiage.
The widespread reporting on hacked emails from Sony Pictures -- spurred by the upcoming release of an allegedly funny movie about assassinating North Korean despot Kim Jong Un -- might encourage some gloating from people who would like to bring Hollywood down a peg. But hold the schadenfreude. The media's ethics -- or seeming lack of ethics -- are troubling. Take CNN "Reliable Sources" host Brian Stelter in an interview with the program "Access Hollywood." His ethical position? Anything goes, as long as the journalists aren't the hackers. "It would be wrong and it would be illegal for the journalists to do the hacking and find these stolen documents," Stelter declared. "But once they're out in the public domain, they are, I'm sorry to say, fair game. They are sort of a free-for-all. That doesn't make it right necessarily, but it makes it inevitable."
Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Elizabeth Warren are polar opposites, a Tea Party conservative and an Occupy Wall Street socialist. Then there are the similarities: Both were elected in 2012, both have Harvard on their resume and both are mentioned as presidential material. But the media's read of the two demonstrates an unquestionable slant. Both senators have shaken up the Senate over heavy spending and regulation. When Warren does it, she's promoted as a profile in courage, standing up for fairness. When Cruz does it, he's a selfish brat causing meltdowns.
The year is winding down with some good TV news: The amoral biker-gang drama "Sons of Anarchy" has ended its seven-year run on the cable channel FX, after a final season drenched in pointless sex and violence. Jax, the leader of the gang, shot a bunch of his enemies dead and then drove his motorcycle straight into the oncoming grill of a semi truck. The show wound down into a relentless deathfest. Jax shot his mother dead, because she stabbed his wife in the neck with a barbecue fork. Most of the cast was slaughtered. And for what? It all seemed like a long slog of sensationalism for its own sake.
