By and large, neither politicians nor entertainment executives regard the press as a check on the abuse of power, or as the representatives of the public. They regard journalists as nuisances -- useful idiots.

The White House is not shy about this; the president and his people have patiently explained that they view reporters as a special interest group, one constituency among many, and the administration has notoriously issued deceptive news video press releases voiced by ersatz reporters, in the hope that local stations will confuse them with news.

Some reporters take great pains not to cross lines, and to disclose conflicts of interest when they're unavoidable. Many publications and broadcasters have codes of conduct designed to prevent even the appearance of a conflict. Professional associations in journalism and public relations, and the schools that train future practitioners, post guidelines and teach standards. And, of course, there are laws against payola and domestic propaganda.

But consider the rise of the political pundit industry, driven by the insatiability of 24-hour cable news; the advent of faux think tanks funded by right-wing billionaires; the popularity of the glossy magazines and stripstrip-syndication shows that exist to flatter; the transformation of news from public interest to profit center; the conglomerates housing news and entertainment under the same roof. It's no wonder journalism's boundaries have blurred.

These days, anyone can be a pundit or celebrity correspondent; all you have to do is put up a shingle, and find someone willing to publish or air what you have to say. And in the Internet era, everyone can be a publisher.

Seems like a good enough excuse to dive into my quote file for a selection of quotes and excerpts about journalism:

If the ... press somehow vanished, and if all of us could, through the Internet or 500-channel TV, get exactly the information we wanted, we would still want some way to compare impressions, to put things in perspective, to ask other people, "What do you make of this?"

James Fallows
Breaking the News (1996)

Why get your news from seasoned professionals when you can get half-witted rumors from random strangers [on the Internet]?

Joel Achenbach
"Reality Check" in
Washington Post (12/2/96)

Network junkies excitedly tell me that self-publishing leapfrogs over publishers, editors and broadcasters. The network passes messages from your keyboard to a thousand other monitors. It's not one-to-one communication like the telephone or one-to-many broadcasting like radio. Rather it's a many-to-many medium, a garden where freedom of speech blooms.

But the reality is that with millions of users posting messages to the network, the valuable gets lost in the dross. There are no pointers to the good stuff - you don't know which messages are worth reading. You can select by subject area, but there's no way to pick only the interesting comments. With everyone able to upload their work to the network, the Internet begins to resemble publishers' slush piles. It's up to the reader to separate out the dregs. What's missing from the network are genuine editors.

Ah, editors! The bane of writers, reporters, and publishers, editors yet serve as a barometer of literary quality and advocates for the reader. Without them on the net, you simply have no way of telling what's worth reading.

By eliminating editors, our networks demonstrate their importance. There are plenty of writers on the Usenet, but few editors. It shows.

Indeed the best newsgroups rely on voluntary moderators, serving as unpaid filters. ... Their attempts to impose order on the chaos generate resentment, accusations of censorship, and occasional subversion; but it's the moderators who give shape and direction to the newsgroups. There are so few moderated newsgroups only because nobody's willing to put in the long, unpaid hours.

Clifford Stoll
Silicon Snake Oil (1995)

Michael Schudson, a professor at the University of California at San Diego who is a prominent academic theorist of the news, has used the thought-experiment of a news establishment that suddenly vanishes, in order to show the real value of journalism.

Suppose, Schudson has said, that the elite press, which filters the news in a way may people dislike, went out of business sometime in the near future. Suppose further that, thanks to imminent advances in technology, each person could get exactly the information he or she wanted, with none of the annoying "spin" from editors or commentators. With a vastly expanded system of cable TV, each viewer could watch sessions of each congressional committee, each state legislature, each city council. Through the Internet, people at home could instantly find the latest research reports about heart disease, or AIDS, or the effectiveness of different exercise schemes. Through fully indexed online version of the Congressional Record, they could find out what any congressman said about any theme. On Court TV and its many channels [sic] they could follow all the major legal battles. If they wanted to know the crime rates for each part of town or the crash rate for each commuter airline company, they could pull up that information too. The media establishment as we know it would seem to be short-circuited. And yet, Schudson wrote in his book The Power of News, "Journalism - of some sort - would be reinvented."

People would want ways to sift through the endless information available. What is more important? What is most relevant? What is most interesting? People would want help interpreting and explaining events. ... It is hard to picture the contemporary world, even in the face of a technology that makes each of us potentially equal senders and receivers of information, without a
specialized institution of journalism.

James Fallows
Breaking the News (1996)
quoting Michael Schudson from
The Power of News (1995)

Few people truly want raw data, they seek information, taste, even wisdom. Filtering the Net gusher is essential, and finder software continues to improve beyond the simple key-word seekers of today. But these still take our scarcest resource: time. Often gobs of it.

Gregory Benford
"A Scientists's Notebook: Net@Fandom.com" in
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (6/96)

[The] real purpose [of journalism] is to satisfy the general desire for information to have meaning. People want to know the details, but they also want to know what the details mean. ... What we read in the papers and see or hear on TV and radio should provide context that gives meaning to information.

James Fallows
Breaking the News (1996)

At a time when people are being bombarded daily with more and more headlines and more and more information, they are, ironically, becoming less informed.

Henry Luce
prospectus for the creation of Time magazine

In a world glutted with information, constant updates are not only a diminishing asset, they are becoming a dangerous distraction. Watching could be hazardous to our health. ... Since the dawn of time, humans have constructed a quilt of community understanding out of new information. In a world of information scarcity, messenger-journalists performed the vital service of acquiring and transmitting fresh data. ... Then information came into abundance. Data is now so plentiful that consumers face the curious hazard of an information glut. We cannot keep up with the information we produce. ... Today's challenge is to manage the vast quantity of information we already have stored up ... to share this information with each other, to manage it thoughtfully, and to transform it into knowledge inside millions of individual brains. This is not so much fact-hunting as it is data-gardening.... Journalists who limit their role to news flashes are absolving themselves of their overarching obligation to the audience. In our new world, reporters must become more like teachers, and we all must learn the skills of the librarian. Information management is the fuel for our thriving civilization.

David Shenk
"More Is Less" in the "Idees Fortes" section of
Wired magazine (2/97)

When asked what they do, journalists can offer all sorts of answers. At times we'll say we're there to provide information, to report on an ongoing debate, to "keep the people informed." At other times we'll say we exist to be "watchdogs" on the people in power - to make sure they don't abuse it or lie or steal. Sometimes we'll say our main obligation is to "fairness" and "balance." Other times we'll say our goal is to push politicians beyond their normal back-and-forth and challenge their assumptions, their facts (or non-facts) and the hidden purpose behind their rhetorical gambits. Sometimes we speak in grand terms about our obligations to "the people" or "democracy" or "free speech." Other times we'll speak mainly in terms of professional ethics, focusing on our obligations to live by certain rules and well-worked-out conventions. Sometimes we'll revel in our stance as the friends of the underdog, defining our role as involving "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable." Other times we'll vehemently deny bias in favor of the down-and-out and insist that we are thoroughly fair and accurate in assessing the good and the bad in even wealthy and powerful institutions. Sometimes we'll acknowledge that the media has commercial purposes - we make our money, after all, by winning large audiences and selling them to advertisers. Therefore, we often have to entertain as well as inform. Other times we'll argue passionately that money does not affect what we do, that we report the news without fear or favor and don't care whom we might offend.

It can be argued, of course, that each of these statements is true as far as it goes. ... Yet journalists themselves, when not under fire, readily concede that there are some real contradictions in their own rationales for what they do.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.
They Only Look Dead (1996)

[R]eporters have the naive notion that if they tell some of both sides of a story, their readers will know who was lying.

Saul Green
"Pseudoscience in Alternative Medicine"
Skeptical Inquirer (Sept/Oct 97)

When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into the absolute.

Walter Lippmann
The Public Philosophy (1955)

The fact that your voice is amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other does not confer upon you greater wisdom or understanding than you possessed when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other.

Edward R Murrow (1965) (attributed)

The art of writing is in fact largely the perversion of words, and... the less obvious this perversion is, the more thoroughly it has been done.

George Orwell
[presumably from] "New Words" (essay, 1940) in
Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (1997)
ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus

Much of what passes for journalism is in fact mere titillation or dressed-up gossip or polite prejudice. The media have abandoned civil society for the greater profits of the private sector, where their public responsibilities no longer hobble their taste for commercial success.

Benjamin R. Barber
"Securing Global Democracy"
Jihad vs. McWorld (1995)

The confusion of fact and opinion in public debate was the focus of a powerful 1994 essay in the New York Times by Michiko Kakutani. "Throughout our culture," she wrote, "the old notions of 'truth' and 'knowledge' are in danger of being replaced by the new ones of 'opinion', 'perception,' and 'credibility.'" She argued that "as reality comes to seem increasingly artificial, complex and manipulable, people tend to grow increasingly cynical, increasingly convinced of the authenticity of their own emotions and increasingly inclined to trust their ideological reflexes. ..." In such a situation there are no arguments in the sense of an engagement over ideas and evidence but simply a clash of assertions. In this climate, said Kakutani, "the democratic idea of consensus is futile." We are witness to the creation of "a universe in which truths are replaced by opinions."

E.J. Dionne, Jr.
They Only Look Dead (1996)

The function of a good newspaper and therefore of a good journalist is to see life steady and see it whole.

Charles Prestwich Scott (attributed)

Call it the "whoops factor," a phenomenon that starts with shoddy research or the misinterpretation of solid research, moves on quickly to public outcry, segues swiftly into the enactment of new laws or regulations and often ends with news organizations and some public policy mavens sounding like the late Gilda Radner's character, Emily Latella, as they sheepishly chirp, "Never mind!" ... Underneath the embarrassing retreats from what in hindsight seems shabby research, superficial journalism or a triumph of politically motivated public relations lies a much deeper problem: Americans' willingness, almost eagerness, to accept a Hobbesian view of man as a brutish thug who if left unchecked will sow chaos and destruction. In this atmosphere, even reports like the one claiming that a quarter of all female college students are raped each year are readily believed. ... Cramped by space and time, and usually not having much knowledge of statistics, journalists are often bamboozled by "experts" bearing impressive numbers or they fail to put the numbers in historical or demographic perspective.

Steven A. Holmes
"It's Awful! It's Terrible! It's ... Never Mind"
Sunday New York Times Week in Review section (7/6/97)

Journalism is not mere entertainment. It is the main tool we have for keeping the world's events in perspective. It is the main source of agreed-upon facts we can use in public discussion. The excesses of journalism have been tolerated because no other institution can provide the benefits journalism can.

James Fallows
Breaking the News (1996)

In abandoning standards of "objectivity" or "fairness" and embracing a certain style of controversy, the press and television may have produced livelier formats without actually enlivening the public debate. The liveliness is, in some sense, artificial. It involves people tossing epithets and one-liners at one another as weapons. Combat between gladiators is not the same as an argument between citizens. Genuine argument involves a real exchange of views and information.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.
They Only Look Dead (1996)

It's absolutely correct to say that there are objectively occurring events ... Speeches are made, volcanoes erupt, trees fall. But news is not a scientifically observable event. News is a choice, an extraction process, saying that one event is more meaningful than another event. The very act of saying that means making judgments that are based on values and based on frames.

Cole Campbell
editor, Virginian-Pilot (newspaper)

Mainstream journalism proudly honors objectivity, balance and accuracy. Buts its execution often sifts these values through the filters of prevailing opinion, new knowledge, old prejudices and standard assumptions about who's worth quoting.

Abe Peck
"Don't Ask, Don't Print" in the
New York Times Book Review (11/3/96)

The press is committed - properly, though sometimes with weird effects - to neutrality on matters of policy. They confine themselves to matters of presentation, which they chew over and reduce to a single piece of consensual wisdom with astonishingly speed. ... These judgments are entirely based on style points, though, because style is a matter it has been granted to the commentators in the press and television to judge. A position may be wrong-headed, but the candidates cannot be marked down for that. He must be marked down for failing to connect with the American public, for speaking in jargon or abstractions, for repeating himself, or for looking at his watch. Positions on the issue can be brought into the equation only when they are sufficiently disreputable for the press to feel professionally comfortable about criticizing them...

Louis Menand
"Dole's Three Strikes" (10/17/96) in
New York Review of Books (11/14/96)

Even more than broadcast coverage of national or world events, local TV news suggests an environment of generalized menace that cannot really be understood but that viewers should try to insulate themselves from. ... The accumulated impact ... [is] to give citizens a nightmarish view of life in their own community.

James Fallows
Breaking the News (1996)

If it bleeds, it leads.

media consultants' recommendation to local TV news to
feature crimes, fires, autowrecks, etc (c.1990)

The nation whose population depends on the explosively compressed headline service of television news can expect to be exploited by demagogues and dictators who prey upon the semi-informed.

Walter Cronkite
A Reporter's Life (1997)

Update: Check out Kid Oakland (on Daily Kos) on "George Bush and the failure of the U.S. Press":

Our Press has failed our nation, our citizens, our Constitution and, most importantly, the truth. The problem is structural, longstanding and ongoing. The delivery of the News to our citizens....the delivery of the facts that our Democracy must debate to come to a consensus, to make our choices and our votes...is broken.

First, over the last decades the News became more and more entertainment. Then it became not just entertainment but, in the last years, it became polemical entertainment. And while this process played out, the News also became a small part of Very Big Business; our news rooms, newpapers and radio stations became the adjunct outposts of huge corporate conglomerates whose interests are closer to the Board Room and the Club House than to Main Street or Broadway where newsies used to hawk the latest editions.

Both political parties played into this environment with relentless hype and spin....one of them taking advantage of it fully, the other playing the role of the aggrieved, passive victim....both of them, however, always playing into the cutthroat game of the ever quicker cyclone politics of the news cycle.

Either way, the fact is....the context...the framework of the delivering the facts to the American public has fundamentally changed.

George W. Bush and his cohorts lie, distort and spin. Those lies and distortions get picked up and spun forward by countless AM radio jockeys and the FOX network and its Cable copycats, oftentimes using interviews with paid GOP shills....and before the American public has read a single fact check....a single piece of independent investigative journalism...a kind of national freeze has set in. A consensus has formed before the facts have hit the pavement.

[...]

The fact is, during the first term of President George W. Bush, the Press failed America. No individual reporter could stem the tide of what has been a systemic change in how our citizens perceive the truth...but, as a whole, the large organizations could have and should have taken stock of this new environment...and fulfilled their responsibilty to the Constitution, the citizenry and the Truth.

We all know, that did not happen. "The News" is everywhere, but it is more often than not... tripe about murders, disasters and celebrity.

In this context, the administration of George W. Bush has played the game of the "big lie" with impunity. Even when they are caught....it doesn't mean anything because the bulk of perception has already been shaped and spun.

It is not enough for the Press to blame the marketplace for the fact that Americans don't have their facts straight. Simply put, making sure Americans have their facts straight is their job and their moral duty.

I'm sorry, when I see George Bush spewing his palaver about where he plans to take our nation and our world...and hence, how he plans to lie and deceive us for another four years....I can only think of one thing....

where is the Press? Will they be AWOL for another four years?

Amen, brother.

I had heard it suggested one time that the seasons in the temperate zone should be six rather than four in number: summer, autumn, locking, winter, unlocking, and spring. And I remembered that as I straightened up beside our manhole, and stared and listened and sniffed.

There were no smells. There was no movement. Every step I took made a gravelly squeak in blue-white frost. And every squeak was echoed loudly. The season of locking was over. The earth was locked up tight.

It was winter, now and forever.

(The scene is, of course, what happens when Ice-9 is released into the environment and all the water in the world is locked up in ice crystals.)

I'm looking for the source of the "suggestion," either in Vonnegut's own writings or in those of someone else. I recall inquiring on alt.fan.kurt-vonnegut and someone suggesting that the originator of the thought might have been Robert Frost, but I've never been able to track down anything specific.

• On Maggie and the Ferocious Beast, the character of the pig, Hamilton Hocks, a male, is much too interested in cooking and keeping a tidy household. (He lives in a box, an obvious metaphor for a closet.) His obsession with making pumpkin muffins speaks for itself.



• In the Elmo's World segment of Sesame Street, Elmo's pet fish is clearly meant to be a transsexual of some sort. The giveaway is the fish's name, "Dorothy." Elmo, a Muppet of sometimes indeterminate sexuality, but presumably a male, frequently expresses his affection for this gender-bending piscine freak.



• On JoJo's Circus, the gender of the title character, JoJo, appears to be ambiguous at best.



• The character of the Bear on Bear in the Big Blue House is affectionate, caring and concerned about the feelings of others, which obviously pegs him as a homosexual role model. Not once in any episode monitored so far has Bear sat down with a couple of buddies to drink beer, eat nachos and watch professional football on TV



• Many of the characters on Dora the Explorer are clearly immigrants, since they do not speak American, only Spanish. (While some may argue that this complaint is unrelated to those concerning homosexual characters, this liberal relativism overlooks the fact that deviances of all types are mutually supporting, and that more widespread speaking of non-approved languages by animated characters helps to create the atmosphere of permissiveness in which gay cartoon icons can proliferate.)



• Similarly, the relationship of the boy and his dog on Davey and Goliath seems very close to stepping onto the slippery slope so boldly outlined by Senator Sanatorium.

This small sample just barely scratches the surface of the queer and rancid landcape that has developed in the world of children's television under the regime of Michael Powell.

He had to go -- Think of the children!

Update: James Wolcott points to the disquieting relationship between Yogi and Boo Boo.

1. What's gone up by 10.6% in the four years since Bush took office?

2. What's gone down 0.45%?

3. What else has gone down 25.15%?

4. What's down 11.76%?

5. What's gone down a big 27.36%?

6. And, finally, what's increased by a whopping 33%?

Give up?

1. The poverty rate.

2. The Dow Jones average.

3. The NASDAQ.

4. The S&P 500.

5. The dollar measured against the Euro.

6. The national debt.

Numeralist has the figures.

So, the next time someone asks you if we are better off than we were four years ago, you can say with all honesty that we're about 10 - 25% worse off.

What's the point of loudly pushing a proposal you're going to lose? What's behind it all?

It's just a thought, but when the magician is doing something flashy with one hand, it's usually to distract you from what he's doing with the other -- and it occurs to me that while we're all agog about Social Security privitization, we're not doing a lot of talking about what's going on in Iraq. (Josh Marshall, for instance, has hardly mentioned Iraq in donkey's years, he's so focused on Social Security.)

Is it possible that at least one of the points is to distract us from our real crisis, the one that could sink Bush? (As we know, there is no crisis in Social Security.) Economic issues are important, but not terribly sexy or exciting -- but losing a war -- and, to be sure, we're losing this one -- is a damn sure way to go down, fast.

When Bill Clinton was president, I'm not sure he had any bigger supporter than me. But many of those who worked with him in the White House got into a mindset that can easily lead Democrats astray in our present circumstances. Clinton's critics often knock him for his reliance on tactical positioning, on tacking back and forth against the wind, on finding the small rhetorical or policy distinctions, the sweet spots that could upend his opponents.

But when you hold the White House those approaches really can work -- because you have three levers of power, the executive branch, the bully pulpit and the veto pen. That power gives you control over the terms and pace of the debate. And those let you bring clever tactics and fancy footwork into play.

But the Democrats don't have any of that today. They're completely excluded from power in Washington. The only effective power they have is the ability to deny the president the cover of bipartisanship in enacting his agenda when his agenda conflicts with their fundamental principles.

[...]

This isn't 1995 or 1996 when Clinton could dance around Newt Gingrich or hoodwink him with rhetoric and policy jujitsu. To the extent this gets down to a discussion of the nitty-gritty, Bush will just roll right over the Democrats.

And in a sense, why shouldn't he? One doesn't have to see this as a matter of President Bush's excessive partisanship or divisive governing style. True negotiations are seldom possible when there is a fundamental disparity in power between the two sides negotiating, as there is today between President Bush and his Democratic opposition.

When I think about Clintonite tactics and their one-time practitioners who are still in the game, I'm often reminded of a game of 'King of the Hill'. There are tactics that work great when you're at the top of the hill that aren't worth a damn when you're at the bottom. And there's nothing sadder than seeing someone at the bottom of the hill using top of the hill tactics. Actually, there is something sadder: when that person is you.

In a sense, Clinton used the powers of the presidency to create space for what is simply 'politics' -- the organized tussle of debating and changing minds. But most of President Bush's major legislation has gone through without 'politics' in this sense ever even happening. In almost every case, President Bush had his bill, he had compliant majorities in each chamber, and he just passed it. So long as there was not overwhelming and spirited public opposition it just went through. 'Politics', in the sense I've described it, seldom even got off the ground since it didn't particularly matter which way the public debate went.

No one is saying that Democrats should meet the president with effrontery. That would be counterproductive. Nor should the Democrats be unwilling to work together if President Bush supports legislation that doesn't go against Democrats' fundamental principles. But President Bush has made explicitly clear in this case that his proposal will go against those principles and he's made clear over the last four years that he has little interest in true legislative give-and-take.

Given those facts and given that the Democrats hold neither the White House nor either chamber of Congress, the only power the Democrats have is their power to state the facts clearly and withhold the legitimacy they alone can impart through providing bipartisan cover. This isn't rude or political. If Democrats believe private accounts are wrong they should say so and vote so. No voter expects politicians to vote for bills they believe are flatly wrong.

[...]

Should the Democrats have an alternative beyond just saying 'no'. Yes, they should. And they have a very good one. But it is very much the secondary part of the strategy. And their alternative can only be comprehensible and effective if the primary part is made sufficiently clear: that Democrats don't believe Social Security is in crisis and that whatever long-term funding challenges it faces do not require a fundamental revision of the structure of the program, let alone phasing it out as President Bush wants to do.

This is what opposition parties do. State their contrary vision where they have one, vote their principles on matters of fundamental political difference, and build a clear contrast on key issues which they can take to the voters in the next election. All the more so when the facts and the people's values are on their side. That's democracy. [Boldface emphasis added -- Ed]

Part of the problem, I think, is that Congressional Democrats still have not allowed themselves to believe that they really are the opposition party, and therefore need to conduct their business in a very different way from that of a party in power. Not that I think they should totally reconcile themselves to this change of status and settle in for the long haul as second fiddles, but it does seems as if a different kind of leadership is required, and a different standard of behavior from the rank-and-file back benchers as well. (A stricter discipline, primarily.)

PBS cuts HBO pix to avoid FCC wrath

'War,' 'April' will have nudity and language removed

By Michael Learmonth

PBS will censor two upcoming films given to the pubcaster by HBO in an effort to protect local public TV stations from potential FCC fines, prexy Pat Mitchell told critics at the winter press tour.

A scene in HBO's "Dirty War" will be edited to omit a naked woman being decontaminated in the aftermath of a "dirty bomb" attack on London. In "Sometimes April," a film about the 1994 Rwandan genocide, PBS will cut a salty expletive Vice President Dick Cheney used on the Senate floor.

The censored films are among the three given to PBS by HBO for airing after they run on the cabler. HBO gave the pubcaster rights to the films in order to gain a wider audience for them. HBO reaches some 30% of the American public, while PBS reaches nearly 99%.

The third film, "Yesterday," about a young African mother with AIDS, will not be censored.

"Cable doesn't have to live with those (FCC) regulations -- we do," Mitchell said.

Fines would put financially strapped local PBS stations at risk and discourage some from carrying the pics, PBS programming exec Jacoba Atlas said. Saturday.

So let me get this straight, Vice President Dick Cheney, an elected public official, tells Senator Patrick Leahy, another elected public official, to "go fuck yourself" on the floor of the United States Senate, one of the primary centers of our democratic government and a public space. Someone makes a film which includes the "go fuck yourself" incident, and PBS, a publicly-funded television organization supposedly dedicated to the public interest, can't or won't show the film intact because it fears that another organ of the federal government, the FCC, will fine it, because 6 people in Alabama will object to it.

The Guardian has more:

Fearful US TV networks censor more shows

Dominic Timms
Tuesday January 18, 2005

The panic that is gripping American TV bosses facing a puritanical backlash or exorbitant government fines has today extended to a cartoon series and a BBC drama.

Fox TV has decided to pixelate a bare derriere in a cartoon series, The Family Guy, which was originally broadcast five years ago with no complaints.

[...]

Fox TV has already been hit by fines from the Federal Communications Commission with its network of affiliate stations each fined $7,000 in October for airing Married by America, a reality series in which a female contestant was seen licking cream from a male stripper's chest.

With its affiliate stations already rapped, FCC is now considering a record $1.2m fine for the Fox network for the same offence.

"We have to be checking and second-guessing ourselves now," Gail Berman, the head of Fox Entertainment, told Variety today.

[...]

While the FCC has been accused by some groups of deliberately undercounting complaints, it has nevertheless shown an appetite for hitting stations with substantial fines.

Last year CBS parent Viacom was given a $500,000 fine for showing a sub-one second glimpse of Janet Jackson's breast during the Super Bowl half-time show.

Fearful of even the slightest protest, Fox this year turned down an advert for a cold remedy because it contained a brief flash of 84-year-old actor Mickey Rooney's bottom.

Other networks are also being ultra-cautious - late last year 66 stations in the ABC network refused to show Steven Spielberg's second world war drama, Saving Private Ryan, because of its explicit language.

Groups such as the Parents Television Council, and the American Decency Association have become increasingly adept at harnessing the power of the internet and email in particular to lobby for what they call family friendly TV.

Supporters can simply email the groups website to have their complaint sent through to the relevant sector within the FCC.

Just last week the PTC urged supporters to mount an email campaign against CBS for re-broadcasting an episode of missing person drama Without a Trace which attracted around 7,500 complaints when it was first shown because it featured scenes of a "teenage orgy".

"As if it isn't bad enough that CBS/Viacom was so irresponsible to air this rubbish once at a time when millions of children were in the viewing audience, they chose to air it again - this time on the heels of their Consent Decree in which they admitted to violating indecency laws and promised to take immediate steps not to do it again," said Tim Winter, the executive director of the PTC.

"We are urging our members and other concerned citizens to file indecency complaints with the FCC about this rebroadcast."

Things are seriously out of whack, I really don't recognize this as the country I grew up in.

Time is out of joint
All telescoped is space
I don't recognize the world
I can't remember its face

Gretchen Cryer & Nancy Ford
The Last Sweet Days of Isaac
(musical, 1970)

I HAVE NO MANHOOD -- WHAT AM I?

YOU HAVE MADE MY WOMAN HEAD OF THE HOUSE -- WHAT AM I?

YOU HAVE ORIENTED ME SO THAT I HATE AND DISTRUST

MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS -- WHAT AM I?

      YOU MISPRONOUNCE MY NAME AND SAY I

      HAVE NO SELF-RESPECT -- WHAT AM I?

      YOU GIVE ME A DILAPIDATED EDUCATION

      SYSTEM AND EXPECT ME TO COMPETE

      WITH YOU -- WHAT AM I?

      YOU SAY I HAVE NO DIGNITY AND THEN

      DEPRIVE ME OF MY CULTURE -- WHAT AM I?

      YOU CALL ME A BOY, DIRTY LOWDOWN SLUT ---

      WHAT AM I?

      NOW I'M A VICTIM OF THE WELFARE SYSTEM --

      WHAT AM I?

      YOU TELL ME TO WAIT FOR CHANGE TO COME,

      BUT 400 YEARS

      HAVE PASSED AND CHANGE AIN'T COME --

      WHAT AM I?

I AM ALL OF YOUR SINS

I AM THE SKELETON IN YOUR CLOSETS

I AM THE UNWANTED SONS AND DAUGHTERS

      IN LAWS, AND REJECTED BABIES

I MAY BE YOUR DESTRUCTION, BUT ABOVE

      ALL I AM, AS

YOU SO CRUDELY PUT IN, YOUR NIGGER.

(The Me Nobody Knows was adapted by Robert M. Livingston and Herb Schapiro, with music by Gary William Friedman and lyrics by Will Holt, based on the book The Me Nobody Knows edited by Stephen M. Joseph and an original idea by Herb Schapiro, with additional lyrics by Herb Schapiro.)



Postscript: Jeralyn Merritt and Kevin Drum on Martin Luther King Jr.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you, my friends, even though we have the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day out in the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; that one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be engulfed, every hill shall be exalted and every mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plains and the crooked places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I will go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.

With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to climb up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning, "My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my father's died, land of the Pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!"

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. So let freedom ring from the hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that, let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi and every mountainside.

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every tenement and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old spiritual, "Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last."

Martin Luther King Jr.
Speech at the Lincoln Memorial
March on Washington (8/28/1963)

Update: Digby on Bill Clinton, MLK and the soul of the Democratic party.

And: This essay by Richard B. Woodward in the NY Times Book Review on the relationship between shopping and holidays makes an interesting point:

Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday is still largely free of ancillary merchandise. Only nonprofit and education foundations may benefit from his legacy. The King family tightly controls his image and words with regular lawsuits against unlicensed profiteers, and groups like the N.A.A.C.P. have spoken out against any hint of commercialization. Yet the absence of a full-blown consumer aura to the holiday may paradoxically prevent King from assuming his rightful place in the nation's life, alongside Washington and Lincoln. After all, you aren't an American icon until your silhouette can be slapped on a newspaper ad to sell a Toyota.

Wooward was being a little arch, I think, but it's still a valid point. When my 5 year old son woke me up today with "Happy Martin Luther King Day, Dad," it threw me a little, since MLK Day isn't the sort of holiday I've associated with that kind of greeting, but any other holiday worth its salt would have an associated greeting, so why not MLK Day? Until we in same way celebrate the day, with some kind of specific event or ceremony, even if the celebrations are a little crass and vulgar and involve shopping, it's bound to remain a second-class holiday, and its value for reminding us of the ideals of Dr. King will be limited.

(Of course, the efforts of the King family to control the exploitation of MLK's image are understandable, and the danger is that the crassification will overwhelm the deeper meaning of the day entirely.)

In the three years I've been blogging I've seen college professors knowingly lie. I've seen gay men sell out their very soul for the sake of pretending that their President doesn't consider them an abomination. I've seen brilliant women with the most clever minds for pop culture force themselves to act stupid for the sake of convincing themselves of the infallibility of recent foreign policy. The right-wing blogosphere has removed itself from any realm of rational discourse and instead established only one principle: win the argument. It doesn't even matter to them what the fucking argument is. If some liberal said something, they're either a hypocrite, a liar, or a traitor. Don't worry, you'll make some shit up to validate that a little later.

The Daily Show has proven this: we've entered an age of satire. There is no other correct response. [...] So just laugh at them. Because both you and they know it's bullshit. And when you laugh at them, and keep laughing, they realize their attempt to snark your comments section didn't work.

[...]

The right-wing bloggers don't want to hear our rebuttals. The President doesn't want to hear the Democrats' counter-proposals. History will never look back on this time and discuss how changes were made through the art of rational bipartisan discussion. But I'm damn sure history has a chance to look back on this era... and laugh.

[via Eschaton]

George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice and their respective flacks lie to you. Repeatedly. Willfully. Without remorse. And they will continue to do so. Today. And tomorrow.

And twice on Sundays. All unfortunately true.