Wednesday, November 19, 2003
Tanks for the Show
I have been getting the daily Progress Report from the Center for American Progress in my e-mail this week--and let me say that if you are a public policy freak, you had better be reading this. It is everything--literally everything--you need to know about the issues behind the headlines you hear each morning. It's nothing less than a noble public service, and a fine antidote to the coordinated talking points conservatives are famous for disseminating to their media mouthpieces.
The Center is, as I wrote last weekend, a progressive think tank designed to counter the influence of conservative tanks like the Heritage Foundation and such. In new postings today, TomPaine.com takes out after think tanks that masquerade as impartial experts while actually dispensing paid propaganda and PR for their sponsors.
Speaking of media mouthpieces, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity get most of the notice as the major blowhards from Fox News. But let me give it up to Shepard Smith, who anchors various programs on the network, and does the conservative scold bit pretty well himself. This afternoon, he was reporting a story about rapper Eminem's latest brush with controversy, a tape in which he uses racial slurs to describe blacks. Fox chose to put the text of the offensive language up on the screen, albeit heavily redacted with asterisks and blanks. Smith started to read it, and then his revulsion overcame him. "Well, you can read it. Why are we showing this? Paint, let's get it off there and move on"--directly addressing, in a tone of rising gorge, the person in the control room whose responsibility it is to put graphics on the screen.
Smith's show of high dudgeon was just that--show. Nobody on network TV reads a script without seeing it first, and nobody on a cable channel is utterly unaware of the graphics that are going to appear on the screen during a scripted broadcast, even a newscast. Smith knew that the offensive text was going to appear, and he knew what it said before he started to read it. The "why are we showing this" was red meat for the Foxophiles at home, a poke in the ribs as if to say, "See? We keep telling you the culture is going to hell. And we're right, you know." What a weenie.
I only watched for a minute or so, I swear.
I have been getting the daily Progress Report from the Center for American Progress in my e-mail this week--and let me say that if you are a public policy freak, you had better be reading this. It is everything--literally everything--you need to know about the issues behind the headlines you hear each morning. It's nothing less than a noble public service, and a fine antidote to the coordinated talking points conservatives are famous for disseminating to their media mouthpieces.
The Center is, as I wrote last weekend, a progressive think tank designed to counter the influence of conservative tanks like the Heritage Foundation and such. In new postings today, TomPaine.com takes out after think tanks that masquerade as impartial experts while actually dispensing paid propaganda and PR for their sponsors.
Speaking of media mouthpieces, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity get most of the notice as the major blowhards from Fox News. But let me give it up to Shepard Smith, who anchors various programs on the network, and does the conservative scold bit pretty well himself. This afternoon, he was reporting a story about rapper Eminem's latest brush with controversy, a tape in which he uses racial slurs to describe blacks. Fox chose to put the text of the offensive language up on the screen, albeit heavily redacted with asterisks and blanks. Smith started to read it, and then his revulsion overcame him. "Well, you can read it. Why are we showing this? Paint, let's get it off there and move on"--directly addressing, in a tone of rising gorge, the person in the control room whose responsibility it is to put graphics on the screen.
Smith's show of high dudgeon was just that--show. Nobody on network TV reads a script without seeing it first, and nobody on a cable channel is utterly unaware of the graphics that are going to appear on the screen during a scripted broadcast, even a newscast. Smith knew that the offensive text was going to appear, and he knew what it said before he started to read it. The "why are we showing this" was red meat for the Foxophiles at home, a poke in the ribs as if to say, "See? We keep telling you the culture is going to hell. And we're right, you know." What a weenie.
I only watched for a minute or so, I swear.
