Columnist.
Is there a clumsier group of newspaper character assassins than the hit squads at The Washington Post? On Oct. 1, the Post was back on the racist-Republican attack with a 3,000 word, investigative treatise over a rock. Specifically, Gov. Rick Perry had leased a property where the N-word was painted on a rock, and then he had it painted over with white paint. But investigative genius Stephanie McCrummen could see a virtual Klan hood on Perry's head. "As recently as this summer, the slab-like rock -- lying flat, the name still faintly visible beneath a coat of white paint -- remained by the gated entrance to the camp."
Back in the 1970s, there was a lot of discussion about the way TV executives were grabbing ratings with female jiggle. "T and A," it was called. The jiggle continues, but now it's coming from somewhere else. So far, the hot new trend of the 2011 TV season is ... dangling male genitalia. That's full-frontal male nudity... hidden behind graphic effects. CBS was thrilled the Sept. 19 premiere of its reboot of the sleazy "Two and a Half Men" drew gonzo ratings. After all the Charlie Sheen drama, how could his TV character's funeral not attract a crowd? But that wasn't enough for Chuck Lorre and Co. They had to debut actor Ashton Kutcher in the nude. First, Kutcher pulled the pixilated-nudie stunt Monday afternoon on the season debut of the Ellen DeGeneres show. Then they repeated it on CBS Monday night -- twice. The opening gag of the season is that Kutcher's character has a stunning endowment.
No one thinks Barack Obama is sitting pretty in this race for the White House. The Real Clear Politics average of the mid-September approval-rating polls measures him at 43 percent approval, 51 percent disapproval. With these numbers, they should be measuring his political coffin. But to listen to the networks talk, it's the Republican field that is a mess in desperate need of new talent, and its debate audiences are a bloodthirsty horror movie. One place that Democratic contenders go for positive publicity is the network morning shows. Their audiences are diminished, but they remain a powerful national platform, especially for female voters. Rich Noyes and Geoff Dickens of the Media Research Center have demonstrated how ABC, CBS and NBC set a pretty pleasant table for the Democratic candidates (and potential candidates like Al Gore) from Jan. 1 through July 31, 2007.
It's easy to get nostalgic for those classic Dean Martin TV celebrity roasts. Just watch a Friars Club Roast on Comedy Central. This is not comedy; they are unremittingly vicious. When they announced they were going to roast Charlie Sheen, a disgraceful human being if ever there was one, there was a sense of karmic comeuppance. Then the show aired, and only someone as deranged as Sheen would find it funny. Sheen is deserving of plenty of verbal head-slaps for his aerobically amoral life with prostitutes, his wife-beating/strangling and his bizarre behavior after being fired by the gutter-level CBS comedy "Two and a Half Men." But this was supposed to be comedic. Instead, it was a merciless bonfire of ferocity. No humanity remained.
Twenty years ago, NBC's "Today" devoted three days of interviews to the insufferable Kitty Kelley, who unspooled baseless allegations against Nancy Reagan, like her supposed love affair with Frank Sinatra. That kind of tabloid bilge belched back up the garbage disposal on Sept. 16, when "Today" promoted the new Palin-bashing book "The Rogue," by leftist author Joe McGinniss. NBC doesn't have an evidence standard when its conservatives are being gored. With liberals, it's a different story. NBC didn't give a second to McGinniss after liberals roundly condemned him in 1993 for his Ted Kennedy book "The Last Brother." In 1996, after the Clinton White House complained, "Dateline NBC" canceled an interview with author and former Secret Service agent Gary Aldrich on his anti-Clinton book "Unlimited Access."
People who love reality television often have a special attraction to "train wreck" shows. For two years now, the tasteless titans of the cable channel TLC have been exploiting the spectacle of hyper-ambitious stage mothers parading around "beauty queens" just barely out of diapers in thousand-dollar gowns. The program is titled "Toddlers and Tiaras." But now it's even worse: They're dressing up little girls as what radio hosts are calling "prosti-tots."
"NBC Nightly News" is the highest-rated daily news show in the morning or evening. In mid-August, the show had been ranked No. 1 for 100 straight weeks, pulling an average of 7.7 million viewers. This makes Brian Williams the king of the TV-news hill. To be sure, it's obviously a smaller hill than the Walter Cronkite era, but in political terms, Williams, like Cronkite, is E.F. Hutton. His newscast can set the tone across the rest of the "news" media. But all that royalty evaporates in the presence of President Barack Obama. The contrast between Williams roaring like a lion against Obama's Republican challengers at the Reagan Library on Sept. 7, and then bowing gently like a lamb at the White House two days later was jaw dropping.
For Hollywood, to push America's morality buttons is a win-win proposition. When they challenge those moribund traditional values, they not only strike a blow for the sexual revolution, they create the cherished publicity "buzz" that brings attention -- and viewers -- to their shows. It explains why ABC's "Dancing with the Stars" named to their cast America's most famous transgender activist. Once the cute little blond daughter, Chastity, that everyone of a certain age remembers from the old "Sonny and Cher Show" on CBS is now the female-denying Chaz Bono.
After the mass shooting in Tucson, Ariz. of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a federal judge and other bystanders, President Obama gave one of those unite-the-divide speeches that give journalists leg thrills. We need to "sharpen our instincts for empathy," he said. He lamented political finger-pointing: "It's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds." The initial speculation was that conservatives were responsible for the Tucson horror. Even after this proved to be false, the attacks were relentless, with a barrage of media reports on the alleged excesses and mean-spiritedness of the Tea Party and all things right of center.
The pied pipers at MTV were certainly delighted that they attracted their largest audience ever measured for their Video Music Awards show, more than 12 million viewers. It began with Lady Gaga as a male impersonator and ended with rapper Lil Wayne dancing around wearing women's leggings affixed literally below his rear end. Lil Wayne's "song" was called "John (If I Die Today)." It was so studded with F-bombs and N-words that more of this number may have been bleeped than aired. There are five F-bombs in the first eight lines. The song starts: "Four-four bulldog, my mother f---ing pet. I point it at you and tell that mother f---er 'fetch.'" The thought is almost humorous that someone at MTV might review the lyrics in advance to insure they were appropriate.
Al Sharpton's claim to fame is he has never found a crisis he couldn't exploit -- even when one doesn't exist. On Friday's pre-hurricane episode of his MSNBC show, "PoliticsNation," he warned "Hurricane Irene is nonpartisan" and that it is threatening both red and blue states. But, nonpartisanship doesn't extend to hurricane coverage on TV, where liberals once again boast about the glories of government disaster aid, and conservatives are trashed as lunatics for wanting to limit the untrammeled growth of spending on natural disasters.
The ratings-hungry producers/exploiters of "reality" TV are in an ongoing search for "edgy" people who are combustibly watchable and whose lust for fame overrides any sense of moral judgment. Then they act shocked when their "characters" self-destruct. The latest, exhibit A: the suicide by hanging of Russell Armstrong, the husband of one of Bravo's "Real Housewives of Beverly Hills." His death came just weeks before Bravo planned to begin airing its second season, in which he would be ridiculed before millions.
One of the greatest perversions of statism is the use of taxpayer money to push for ever more government spending and intervention. A casual listener to the far-left end of the FM dial, National Public Radio, will quickly conclude that NPR is one of America's leading offenders in this perversion. Let's just take one show, the Aug. 22 evening newscast "All Things Considered," perhaps one of the most ill named programs in the history of radio. Conservatism is never considered. It is only besmirched, assaulted and rhetorically dismembered.
A man wearing a Santa hat sits on a roof. He's talking to his ex-girlfriend on a cell phone, trying with feigned cheer to wish her a Merry Christmas. He asks if she's with her new boyfriend. Yes, she replies, and she's with her whole family, opening presents. He says, "That's great, because I have a present for you," and he saws off his own head so it falls down the chimney into the fireplace. This isn't a horror movie. It's a (set ital)cartoon(end ital), filmed in stop-motion animation, like "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." It runs on the Cartoon Network, which is owned by Time Warner. And it's aimed at children.
In the last election cycle, we heard a lot of complaining about the sexist treatment accorded to Hillary Clinton as she campaigned for president. One magazine wrote, "It's her resilience and capacity to survive and thrive against all comers that partly fuels the haters' fury." They even wrote "The anti-Hillary industry has never managed to bring down Hillary herself -- in fact, the more they have attacked, the higher she has risen." That would be Newsweek magazine, in the June 18, 2007 issue. Four years later, Newsweek mocked Republican candidate Michele Bachmann on its cover, making her look pale and confused and, well, nutty -- with the headline "The Queen of Rage." Physician, heal thyself. Now the term "hater's fury" aptly describes the very same "news" magazine that so pompously lectures us about civility every one time one of their favorites is in political crosshairs.
This fall, the Showtime movie channel will air its sixth season of "Dexter," their show glorifying a just serial killer. They recently finished a fourth season of a show called "Californication." It debuted in 2007, with a dream sequence in which the lead character receives oral sex from a nun in a church. So it might seem surprising (or...perhaps not) that Showtime's new promotional package for the fall wraps Showtime characters around...Christianity. The new slogan is "Showtime Saves."
Just like the last Republican takeover of the House in 1995, it was easy to predict the media elite were going to dig deep into the mud and throw every smear they had at the new conservative powers in town. Congress finally passed, and the president signed, a deeply deficient kick-the-can compromise into law in order to raise the debt ceiling. Tea Party conservatives correctly denounced the deal as woefully inadequate.
NBC has placed a new drama called "The Playboy Club" on its fall schedule to capitalize on the scandalous sound of America's most famous pornography empire. If this network had any shame at all, it wouldn't be so desperate to associate itself with female exploitation. So far, one brave NBC affiliate, KSL in Salt Lake City, has refused to join in this porn-promoting parade. "The Playboy brand is known internationally," KSL President Mark Willes declared. "Everyone is clear what it stands for. We want to be sure everyone is clear what the KSL brand stands for, which is completely inconsistent with the Playboy brand. We would be helping to build a brand that stands for pornography. For us, that's just untenable."
You can tell the liberals are really sweating the politics of the debt-ceiling talks when NBC puts on a special "Dateline NBC" devoted to politics. This is normally a time slot devoted to "news" topics like Casey Anthony or Lindsay Lohan. But last week, viewers were "treated" to anchorman Brian Williams actually covering a real news topic. It's just too bad he forgot he was supposed to be a reporter, not an editorialist, spinning furiously against conservatives trying to rein in President Obama's incredibly reckless flood of new spending. The last time Brian Williams showed up in primetime for a splashy special on public policy was an enormous tribute to the then new president, Barack Obama -- making a run for hamburgers with him, hailing how he displayed apples everywhere, and bowing to him and wishing him a pleasant evening after NBC chronicled his glorious day of saving America from recession. You know, just like Williams treated Bush.
They say the movie theaters make more money on popcorn, candy and soft drinks than they do on the movie tickets. If that's true, theater owners really ought to reconsider the previews they're airing. They can make you sick to your stomach. I don't know why Hollywood moviemakers are so fascinated with flatulence and excrement. It's become almost an obsession, a formality of sorts in the "humor" oeuvre.
