Columnist.
On March 2, two U.S. airmen, Nicholas Alden and Zachary Cuddeback, were gunned down at the airport in Frankfurt, Germany. Two other Americans were wounded. The assailant was a radical Muslim. This was a huge story to most Americans -- but, naturally, not to our news media. If the amount of airtime is any measure, the assassination of our troops drew a yawn. That night, ABC's "World News" offered a full report, but CBS and NBC each gave it less than 30 seconds. "Troops under attack in Germany, targeted by a gunman shouting in Arabic about jihad," reported ABC anchor Diane Sawyer. Neither CBS nor NBC found room for "jihad" talk and never found time to ask about the young American lives extinguished.
Most parents think of video games as a child's pursuit, especially the innocent ones. Many people who bought a Nintendo Wii video game system would consider this the most innocent of them all. They watch their children play "Super Mario Bros." on it, or join the family in playing tennis, golf or baseball with their little childlike "Mii" characters on Wii Sports. I never imagined this game system would also be an orgy enabler.
When President Obama's budget came out in February, with the greatest expansion of federal spending in American history, some sycophantic media outlets like The Washington Post ridiculously tried to sell the concept that Obama was pushing "deep cuts." It was a publicity line that collapsed on itself within 24 hours. The Democrats are doing nothing to rein in the spending that is leading America into bankruptcy. What the Republican leadership is proposing, with its minuscule cuts, is next to nothing.
It's so easy to look at teenagers in general today and sigh. They're more than a bit lazy, a bit spoiled and more than a bit morally compromised. Two teenagers made national news. One showed common decency and sportsmanship, two virtues seemingly uncommon in that generation. Hope is restored. Sixteen-year-old wrestler Joel Northrup faced a dilemma when he was scheduled to wrestle Cassy Herkelman, one of only two girls to make it to the state tournament. Even though he entered with a 35-4 record, Northrup forfeited rather than violate his religious principles.
The battle in Madison, Wis., between new Gov. Scott Walker and the public-sector union hacks offers an amazing study in journalistic double standards. The same national media that have spent the last two years drawing devil's horns and Klan hoods on the tea party protesters have switched sides with lightning speed. In the Wisconsin protesters, they find sweetness and light, "hope and change." From her Sunday soapbox, ABC host Christiane Amanpour snobbishly deplored the tea party as not conservative but as "extreme" last fall. In a special "town hall" episode of her show on the ground zero mosque debate, she accused an incredulous Gary Bauer of encouraging vandalism at a Tennessee mosque because somehow Christian rhetoric is offensive. The accusation itself was offensive because it was entirely baseless.
The 911 call went out Jan. 27. Charlie Sheen was unconscious after another wild 36-hour bout with alcohol and drugs. People magazine reported paramedics found him unresponsive, drooling blood. He looked like death. He was rushed to the hospital, and there the family gathered, expecting the worst. Again, he survived. Nobody seems able to stop this train. No one can force him to change. And CBS will stop at nothing in its willingness to dote on its superstar, offering no "judgmental" analysis of his behavior. In this business, profitability comes before respectability. Sheen, star of the filthy sitcom "Two and a Half Men," is the highest-paid actor in television (at $1.2 million per episode), and he can apparently do and say anything and be welcomed back to work. It's why Entertainment Weekly calls Sheen "TV's Most Valuable Disaster."
Jaws dropped across the nation's capital at the audacious annihilation of the truth on the front page of the Feb. 15 Washington Post. The top headline read, "Obama budget makes deep cuts, cautious trades." It's another day at the Post, where every day is an April Fool's joke. Reporter Lori Montgomery didn't exactly say "deep cuts" in her first sentence. She explained that Obama's budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2012 made "surgical cuts and cautious trade-offs." But two paragraphs later, the reporter admitted, "(T)he president's offer to freeze funding for domestic programs would produce minimal savings in the short term." That doesn't match the "deep cuts" headline in large, bold type -- because there are none.
The top of the pop charts has become a low, low place indeed. Just last summer, the singer Cee Lo Green took popular culture one rung lower into the sewer with the release of his song titled "F--- You." After a few weeks, it was mainstreamed into "Forget You," but why bother? While both versions sold well, the vulgar one clearly had its intended effect. The pop star Pink now has her own version with her new single titled "F---in' Perfect." How creative. That's reaching for the stars.
Those censorious liberals who truly hate the very existence of the Fox News Channel denounce it for being a political organization, not truly a news network. Behind that line is decades of liberals being able to strangle, smother and spike news stories they didn't like. Liberals defined what "news" was and what it wasn't. They're still at it today. Take the pro-life group Live Action. On Feb. 1, they released shocking videos showing what they found when they brought hidden cameras into Planned Parenthood clinics, with a man and woman posing as pimp and prostitute. An office manager was taped telling the "pimp" how to evade the law, such as lying about prostitutes' ages if they were children 14 or over. Any younger, and the clinic would be obligated to report to the authorities. "We want as little information as possible," she said conspiratorially.
It seems rather ironic that Hollywood doesn't want to make movies about Ronald Reagan. Perhaps it's because virtually no one in the industry can stand his belief system. Or it could be that Hollywood's last effort was an exercise in character assassination. A made-for-TV movie planned for CBS in late 2003 was ignominiously taken off the schedule and moved to a premium pay-cable channel after outraged conservative protests (which, full disclosure, I heartily joined).
Is it not amazing that it's taken the news media exactly 100 years to discover that Ronald Reagan was a role model? While he lived and even after he died, they shot every arrow and dropped every bomb they could on this man and his reputation. Now that it's his 100th birthday and America is celebrating, they find him useful. They're trying to rub Reagan's magic all over a floundering Obama.
If anyone doubts that our entertainment industry and our entertainment media are evangelists for a revolution of sexual immorality (or in their lingo, "progress"), he needs only to read the latest cover story in Entertainment Weekly magazine, a "special report" on gay teen characters on TV, and "How a bold new class of young gay characters on shows like 'Glee' is changing hearts, minds and Hollywood." Gay "Glee" actor Chris Colfer and his boyfriend on the show, Darren Criss, lovingly put their heads together on the cover. Colfer just won a Golden Globe for his part, which is another way the Hollywood press rewards propagandizing the youth of America. In his acceptance speech, he lamented anyone who would say a discouraging word about teen homosexuality, somehow putting all of those words in mouths of bullies: "Screw that, kids!"
Once again, the "news" media yawned as tens of thousands of Americans clogged the streets of Washington on Jan. 24 for the annual "March for Life." This year's protests should have gained more attention since they came in the wake of absolutely vomit-inducing news from Philadelphia that an abortionist named Kermit Gosnell was charged by the District Attorney with a series of murders. In a horrific 261-page report, Gosnell is accused of delivering seven babies alive and then killing them with scissors. He also allowed a woman who had survived 20 years in a refugee camp in Nepal to be incompetently overmedicated on Demerol and die at his clinic.
The cultural left would like you to think that children should be free to experiment persistently in the Laboratory of Life without soul-stifling rules. They have limits to libertine behavior, to be sure. No high school bake sales (encourages obesity), no bottled water (destroys the environment) and absolutely no uncivil bullying of people who are different than you (unless they belong to the tea party, in which case you can blame them for random shootings). Now those secular progressives at MTV have opened a new front. They feel one should enjoy a childhood stuffed with sex, drugs and alcoholism. That would be the message of their new teen drama "Skins." Adapted from a British series and filmed in Canada, MTV boasts that the actors are actually under 18 -- in another interpretation, we call them "children" -- and that the show's writers are barely out of high school, so its libertine escapades are authentic, "the real secret lives" of teenagers.
OK, so conservatives have to be accused of fostering hatred with our alleged vitriol, the kind of vitriol that fuels the flames of violence, like we witnessed in Tucson except -- well, except there wasn't and isn't a shred of evidence that the killer was influenced by any conservatives since a) he didn't listen to or watch conservative programming and b) isn't a conservative. There is the hypothetical question: What if the perpetrator of violence were liberal? How would the media react then? How many would put Chris Matthews, Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann and Co. on trial for creating the "atmosphere" of "hatred" so often ascribed to conservatives only?
Within minutes of the news breaking that Jared Lee Loughner had killed six and wounded 14 in a rampage outside a Tucson Safeway store, including a critically injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the news media immediately leaped to the conclusion that the harsh tone of our political discourse -- led by conservative talk radio -- surely must be to blame. That narrative turned out to be hogwash, but another one has emerged during the investigation into Loughner's psyche, yet virtually no one wants to discuss it. Was the shooter inspired by the entertainment media?
Imagine the Saturday morning of congressional aide Mark Kimble. Kimble told of going to a Safeway for a typical meet-and-greet event with his boss, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Kimble said he went into the store for coffee, and as he came out, Giffords was talking to a couple about Medicare and reimbursements, and federal judge John Roll had just walked up to her and shouted "Hi" -- when a gunman opened fire. Nobody in America should greet this scene with any other initial reaction than horror. Six people were killed, including Roll, several retirees and a 9-year-old girl. More than a dozen others were seriously injured in the carnage. Giffords was shot in the head and remains in critical condition. Sadly, shamefully, within just minutes, a nasty political spin was kicking in without any brake for decency or evidence. Conservatives were to blame.
The Super Bowl is more than just a huge day for professional football fans. Part of the game's massive audience is there for the chance to see how mega-corporations creatively spend millions of dollars for one Super Bowl commercial. Some Super Bowl ads are brilliant and successful. Budweiser knows it has hit one out of the park when its ad is Monday's water-cooler talk.
Our national media elite reviewed 2010 with great sorrow for how America has besmirched itself in the eyes of the world with its "seething hatred" of Muslims. CBS anchor Katie Couric announced on her Internet show that there wasn't enough evaluation of "this bigotry toward 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide" which was "so misdirected, and so wrong -- and so disappointing." Couric even embarrassed herself by suggesting, "Maybe we need a Muslim version of 'The Cosby Show.'" A ridiculous idea -- unless it were to run every night instead of Couric's lame half-hour "news" report.
2010 may have been an encouraging year for political conservatives, but it wasn't so rosy for America's culture. The most depressing result was the Second Circuit Court of Appeals granting our television networks the right to employ the nastiest curse words in front of children at any hour of the broadcast day. In her opinion, Judge Rosemary Pooler insisted that the TV networks weren't pushing the envelope like "a petulant teenager angling for a later curfew"; they were good people with a "a good faith desire to comply with the FCC's indecency regime." The judge should win some sort of Alice-in-Wonderland prize for declaring the absolute opposite of all the evidence right in front of her face. Here are my other choices for other cultural winners and losers this year:
