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Most Nets Skip Over Their Advocacy of Broadcast Profanity; Newspapers Downplay Critical Voices
Posted on 14. Jul, 2010 by Tim Graham.
Most networks skipped over the story of their own corporate advocacy of broadcast profanity last night when the Second Circuit Court of Appeals shredded the FCC’s broadcast decency regulation. (All the networks signed on, with Fox in the lead). NBC’s Brian Williams offered 94 words, but erred in claiming "When a curse word has slipped out in the past, the FCC has imposed heavy fines on networks." There were no fines for NBC when Bono said "f—ing brilliant" at the 2004 Golden Globes, nor were their fines for Fox when Cher and Nicole Richie for profanity at (respectively) the 2002 and 2003 Billboard Music Awards.
ABC and CBS aired nothing. Fox News had no story in the transcripts offered to Nexis for searching. Fox’s corporate brethren at The Wall Street Journal had a story, but reporters Amy Schatz and Jess Bravin wrote a 727-word article with absolutely zero space for critics of the judges’ decision (including the Brent Bozell-founded Parents Television Council).
The story did make explicit that Fox "led the case against the FCC and that "Fox is a division of News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal."
Other newspapers offered small scraps for anti-profanity groups. The Washington Post’s front-page story by Cecelia Kang offered 50 words out of 771, in paragraph eight:
The Parents Television Council called the decision a "slap in the face," and Concerned Women for America, an advocacy group for indecency rules, urged the agency to appeal, lest broadcast television be open to the sexually explicit content and language of cable programs such as "The Sopranos" and "True Blood."
The New York Times story by Edward Wyatt put the anti-profanity spokesman in the very last paragraph (of a 17-paragraph story), with just 75 words out of 940:
Ted Lempert, president of Children Now, said that while the court’s decision was troubling, it also emphasized the need for clarity about broadcast standards. ”It’s of concern because the F.C.C. has been a critical protector of children’s interests when it comes to media,” he said, adding that he expects that the commission will try to construct a more targeted approach to keeping indecency off the airwaves at times when children are likely to be watching.
National Public Radio reported the story on Tuesday night’s All Things Considered by getting a rundown and analysis of the court case from legal reporter Nina Totenberg, but she offered zero reaction to the decision from anti-profanity groups. But on Tuesday’s Morning Edition, NPR offered another story on FCC regulatory policy – on the proposed NBC-Comcast merger – and NPR found air time for several critics gainst the media companies on the antitrust front. (And Totenberg did a story in that program on the Supreme Court year in review, with former Totenberg intern Tom Goldstein insisting there are not really any liberals on the court.)
The networks are obviously terrible at covering themselves when they were brazen enough to go to court and argue that they should have the right to broadcast profanities of any kind at any time of the day. That is the effect of the 2nd Circuit’s decision. At the very least, they ought to be willing to air critics of ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox (and CW, if anyone cares). Censoring the story and the dissenters is a cowardly act. Remember this the next time they bray about the "public’s right to know."
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N.Y. Times Not So Keen on Human Safety? ‘400 Park Geese Die, for Human Fliers’ Sake’
Posted on 14. Jul, 2010 by Tim Graham.
"Animal rights" groups often suggest that animal lives are just as precious as human lives, or even that innocent, instinctual animals are morally superior to arrogant reasoning humans. That view came through on the front page of The New York Times on Tuesday, in the headline "400 Park Geese Die, for Human Fliers’ Sake." Times reporter Isolde Raftery channeled shock and disgust that authorities would euthanize Canada geese in Prospect Park for the sake of human air travelers — even as the nation still recalls pilot Chesley Sullenberger’s heroic Hudson River landing of a jet that failed after hitting geese.
Raftery left out the animal-rights partisans at the "Stop the Goose Holocaust" page on Facebook, which declares "This is a group devoted to stopping the Holocaust of New York area Canada Geese by that Nazi psycho Michael Bloomberg, who mocks and jests about it. He claims to be pro-immigrant but obviously hates Canadians, and especially Black Canadians, which the geese are."
In this case, the euthanizers were the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which have spurred goose memorial services in other states with their population-limiting actions. USDA spokeswoman Carol Bannerman offered the federal line:
Ms. Bannerman said the measure was necessary. “The thing to always remember in this New York situation is that we are talking about aviation and passenger and property safety,” she said. “In New York City, from 1981 to 1999, the population increase was sevenfold.”
The authorities have been thinning the region’s ranks of geese since some of them flew into the engines of US Airways Flight 1549 in January 2009, forcing it to ditch in the Hudson River. Last summer, 1,235 were rounded up at 17 sites around the city and later killed. But the Prospect Park culling appears to be among the biggest, and its scope mortified some residents.
“It’s a horrible end,” said Anne-Katrin Titze, who went to the park nearly every morning to feed the geese. “It’s eerie to see a whole population gone. There’s not one goose on this lake. It looks as though they’ve been Photoshopped out.”
Ms. Titze and her partner, Ed Bahlman, noticed that the geese were missing on their regular trip to the park on Thursday. The couple found plastic zip-tie restraints in a pile near gosling feathers. They learned what had happened to the geese from news reports on Monday.
“The fact that this was done without letting the public know is the first concern,” Mr. Bahlman said. “There were so many people in the park over the last four days who noticed the geese were gone.”
In recent weeks, the Canada geese have begun their annual molting, meaning they could not fly. Their capture was timed to the molting.
Susan Elbin, conservation director at New York City Audubon, was cautiously supportive of the mass euthanizing. “There are ways to manage birds nonlethally,” Ms. Elbin said. “But if you’re trying to manage a population level, sometimes those hard decisions need to be made.”
The goal is to eliminate most of the geese within seven miles of the major airports in the region. Prospect Park is 6.5 miles from both La Guardia Airport and Kennedy Airport.
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WaPo Insists GOP Lacks Confidence of 72 Percent; But 43 Percent Said They Had ‘Some’
Posted on 13. Jul, 2010 by Tim Graham.
The Washington Post announced bad news for its largely liberal readers in its poll Tuesday morning. The headline said "6 in 10 Americans lack faith in Obama: Congress still held in lower esteem, but poll shows gap narrowing." Those who read the story would wait until the end of paragraph six (just before the jump) to get this liberal-haunting number: "Those most likely to vote in the midterms prefer the GOP over continued Democratic rule by a sizable margin of 56 percent to 41 percent."
But if the Post reader skipped the gray text and went just for the graphics, they’d get the impression that Republicans are worse off than the Democrats: they’d see asked "how much confidence do you have" in the parties, they showed Obama’s "lack faith" number at 58 percent, Democrats in Congress at 68 percent, and Republicans at 72 percent.
But wait: in parentheses it says "percent of voters saying ‘just some’ or ‘none’". (That wasn’t bolded in the paper, as it is on the website.) Here’s the rub: deep in the Post’s data (question 3), it shows Republicans "just some" number was 43 percent and "none" was 29 percent, while Democrats "just some" number was 35 percent and "none" was 32 percent. So portraying the Republican standing as "worse" than the Democrats (complete with trouble-red emphasis) is misleading at best.
Post reporters Dan Balz and Jon Cohen simply blurred the numbers together, without a breakdown: "About seven in 10 registered voters say they lack confidence in Democratic lawmakers and a similar proportion say so of Republican lawmakers."
But the networks took that misleading impression and hardened it, with NBC’s Matt Lauer proclaiming "just slightly more than 7 in 10 Americans don’t have faith in Republicans in Congress." That quick-and-dirty formulation has zero room for 43 percent of Americans saying "just some."
The real problem here is the news judgment of the Post: the first question isn’t "How much confidence?" It’s "Who are you voting for?" If the Republicans are up 56-41 among likely voters, clearly the "just some" confidence is presently more than enough.
Near the bottom of the poll story, it gets even darker for Democratic prospects:
Obama’s overall standing puts him at about the same place President Bill Clinton was in the summer of 1994, a few months before Republicans captured the House and Senate in an electoral landslide.
President Ronald Reagan, who also contended with a serious recession at the outset of his first term, was a little lower at this point in 1982, with a 46 percent to 45 percent split on his approval ratings. Republicans went on to lose about two dozen seats in the House that fall.
The Post projected its poll as bad for Democrats, but not happy news for Republicans. Inside the paper, the headline was "Obama viewed slightly better than lawmakers." The text box on A6 acknowledged "Democrats nationally remain on the defensive as they seek to retain both houses of Congress this fall."
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The F-word Habit: AP Reports on Death of ‘Fetus’ in Boston Nail-Salon Assault
Posted on 13. Jul, 2010 by Tim Graham.
Last year, Brent Bozell lamented the murder of Darlene Haynes in Worcester, Massachusetts, with her baby cut out of her womb, and how the media called it a "fetus" — even after the baby was born in a violent kidnapping. Now there’s a Massachusetts repeat, except this time, it was the baby that was killed in a Boston-area nail salon assault.
On the Boston Herald website, the AP headline was "Wellesley woman indicted in death of fetus." AP reported that "Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel Conley said Sunday that Ayanna Woodhouse will be arraigned on charges of manslaughter and aggravated assault Monday in Suffolk Superior Court."
AP added: "The female fetus was delivered by emergency Cesarean section, but did not survive."
The Herald also assigned its own reporter to the story, with the headline "Prosecutors: Unborn baby in deadly Dot attack ‘had no chance’."
Reporter Laurel Sweet had more respect for the humanity of the baby (and the denial of the mother’s "choice" to carry it), but the F-word crept into her copy as well:
The stomping death of Tori Catron’s unborn daughter as the mother-to-be was beaten and dragged across the floor of a Dorchester nail salon was an attack so brutal she and her baby “had no chance,” assistant Suffolk District Attorney Leora Joseph said today.
Ayanna Woodhouse, 25, stands accused of killing the 6-month-old fetus by ripping the placenta from Catron’s uterus with her kicks the night of April 10 inside Tulip’s Nails Salon on Neponset Avenue….
Joseph said both Woodhouse and Catron left the scene before police arrived, with Catron immediately feeling pain in her pelvis. She later went to the hospital. Her daughter was delivered stillborn by emergency C-section the morning of April 11.
In 2008, Bozell wrote a column demanding a ban to the word "fetus" in news stories:
What a cold, humanity-negating word that is. Happy pregnant women carry "babies." But indecisive or panicked pregnant women carry a "fetus." How discriminatory that sounds in regard to an innocent human life.
"Fetus" has a dictionary definition: the young of a mammal that resembles its parents in physical form, in our case, a human with hands and feet and eyes and a beating heart. But to our media and political analysts, it has a different definition: a subhuman appendage, a disposable mass of tissue, a slave to our whims, and too often, a casualty of our irresponsibility.
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On PBS, Oliver Stone Loved Hugo Chavez Calling Dubya the ‘Devil’: ‘It’s True’
Posted on 12. Jul, 2010 by Tim Graham.
Here’s another slightly dated example of leftist America-bashing on the taxpayer-funded airwaves over the patriotic holiday weekend. PBS talk-show host Tavis Smiley interviewed leftist director Oliver Stone on July 2 about his Hugo Chavez-smooching documentary South of the Border. Stone denounced Hillary Clinton as "an agent of the old empire game," and when Smiley nudged Stone about Chavez’s remarks, Stone insisted he loved it when Chavez called Bush the Devil: "I think that’s a great comment. I think it’s true….He is the devil. He was."
Smiley didn’t simply celebrate Stone (as he did, with say, Van Jones, boldly professing he would take a bullet for Jones), but he was gentle in bringing up some hard questions. He suggested he didn’t really want to dwell on the Bush-as-Satan stuff:
SMILEY: If I’d wanted to, I could have done this. I didn’t want to waste our time doing it, but because the stuff is so easily found all over the internet – you know where I’m going with this.
You know, on the regular, there are statements made by Chavez that cause people in this country to shudder, all kinds of things, about everything that Chavez – as you know, he’s not shy about speaking his mind. So he has made all kinds of comments about all kinds of things. None of those statements give you reason to believe that he’s gone a bit off the range?
STONE: No, no. Listen, I was with him not too long ago. I was with him in 2007 and 2009. I mean, he’s under attack, but he’s a free man and I think sometimes he speaks without perhaps – he’s a big bear of a man. He’s gruff, you know, and he sometimes speaks off the cuff. He is a popular leader, but he serves the people. He’s not corrupt in any way. I find him a free soul.
SMILEY: Off the cuff remarks, off the wall remarks, two different things. You think they’re off the cuff, not off the wall?
STONE: Well, I don’t know which ones you’re referring to. I mean, if he’s calling Bush – "the Devil was here yesterday" – you know, I think that’s a great comment. I think it’s true. I mean, at that point, Bush was going to war in Iraq against the wishes of the majority of the United Nations.
By the way, as somebody has pointed out, Chavez at the U.N. that day got the most longest applause of anybody there at the entire sessions. It’s quite something. So North America has made a big issue of everything he says, but, you know, Bush is the one who started the war.
The coup d’etat of 2002, you know, was initiated by the Venezuelan oligarchy and supported and abetted by the U.S. and we make that very clear in the film.
SMILEY: I’ll recall that comment about Bush as long as I live. As you may have heard -
STONE: – Well, he is the devil. He was.
Smiley deserves some credit for questioning around the edges about Chavez’s dictatorial tendencies, even as Stone denied it all as ridiculous. When Smiley asked whether Obama was different than Bush, he complained it was "Bush lite," and knocked Hillary Clinton:
You know, Hillary was down there a few weeks ago and there she was trying to separate Ecuador from Venezuela. She’s an agent of the old empire game. It’s a dead end for us. We keep overreaching. We want to control anybody who steps out of line, which is a regional power….
We are saying – basically, you know what it is? The pact for the New American Century, remember from the 1990s, when Bush and Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz, wrote that pact about the American unilateral control of the world. We will brook the appearance. We will not allow for the emergence or any military or economic rival. I went into that in the W film I did on Bush.
This is our policy and, whatever Obama says, this is what he’s pursuing in Afghanistan. There’s been no real change in that policy. We have our empire; we are number one. We are the world’s policemen and we will not brook an interference in that. The tone is lighter; the words are lighter, but it’s a soft power.
It’s not strictly anti-American to knock President Bush or Hillary Clinton, but Stone had a more generic critique of "our empire," and overall American arrogance in global affairs:
STONE: The U.S. has knocked off so many reformers over the last hundred years, but they’ve all emerged independently. Except for Castro, they all went down, every single one from Guatemala, Panama, Brazil, Chile, constantly. This is the first time we have not been able to do anything. Hopefully, this is going to stay stable, but right now we’re fighting actively to get rid of them.
SMILEY: You’re not naive, obviously. You like shaking things up, don’t you?
STONE: No, I like -
SMILEY: Yeah, you do. Come on.
STONE: If I were, I’d be more political. I’d be more overt.
SMILEY: This isn’t political and overt?
STONE: Well, I like making movies. I love feature movies, as you know, but documentaries are fresh and they keep me humble and they keep me in the field. If I can contribute a little light to the worldwide cause and alert people in our country as to what our empire is really doing, I think I’d be doing some good in my life.
