The Final Hurdle
O Happy Day! Here at last, it's here at last!

Finally, finally, someone--one brave little billion-dollar multinational corporation--has had the courage to abandon Janus-like two-faced hypocrisy and come right out to declare their political agenda.

Most mega-corporations are too busy mealy-mouthing, keeping their mouths shut while they funnel vasts amounts of cash to support candidates/parties/causes that reflect their own best interests, ethics be damned. The really deplorable ones will give money to both sides in order to hedge their bets.

Thank God, then, for the Sinclair Broadcast Group of Maryland, owners of 62 broadcast (not cable, broadcast) television stations. Undeterred by such old-fashioned ideas as stewarding the public trust that is television or maintaining a sense of professional dignity for the greater good of all your audience (not just the saps who happen to already agree with you), the Sinclair Group is ordering its stations to pre-empt programming next week in order to show an anti-Kerry "documentary".

At long last, the final wall is about to be broken down. No more waiting for political programming and content to crop up in its proper place in an election cycle in the form of debates, campaign ads or political talk shows; that old predictable, avoidable way is so 2000. We're on our way, people. This is the first step into a new world where naked political partisanship seeps into your consciousness at all hours in all forms of media based entirely on a corporate whim. The availability of what you want to watch is immaterial. You will watch this.

Now that Sinclair has taken the step to overrun your expected Joan of Arcadia viewing time with a howling visual screed, the next logical step, of course, is to figure out a way to physically force people to watch this stuff.

That's something I expect Rupert Murdoch and the good people at Fox News to have worked out in time for 2008.

Big long heavy sigh.

Some conservatives will say "Oh yeah, but what about Michael Moore?" to which I will reply: his movies are shown in theaters. You can view them in exchange for money, which you are not required to pay. I myself have not seen Fahrenheit 9/11 yet, nor have I happened across it by accident while trying to watch re-runs of Matlock. It isn't being piped into my home on top of something else in prime time as extra-ordinary programming so that a corporate giant can flex its political muscle and affect the outcome of an election.

If the Federal Election Commission and the Federal Communications Commission don't both come down on Sinclair like a one-ton burlap bag of shit, then both bodies should be disbanded as completely irrelevant.

Sinclair says they invited John Kerry to come on their stations and rebut the documentary and therefore they meet the equal-time requirement and can't be cited for violating any number of FCC or FEC statutes and restrictions.

But is that really the test? If I want to broadcast a documentary that features a guy who says he's George Bush's current coke-dealer/dungeon-master/gay sex partner, all I have to do is invite GWB to talk about it. If he (shockingly!) says no, ah well, I tried. On with the show.

But these are the Sinclair people, the same ones who refused to air Nightline the night they broadcast the names (no commentary, just the names) of those who had died to that point in Iraq because it was, in their words, "contrary to the public interest."

Now this broadcast, to do with Kerry's post-Vietnam anti-war activity and... something about with POWs. Apparently the POWs, behind the starvation, exposure, isolation, filthiness, beatings and torture, were really really bummed out by John Kerry opposing the war.

Hmm, so US POWs 30 years ago in Vietnam, vitally important to the immediate public interest while dead US soldiers right now, not so much. Fascinating.

Here's Sinclair's defense: "This is a powerful story... The networks are acting like Holocaust deniers and pretending [the POWs] don't exist. It would be irresponsible to ignore them."

Opposing anti-Kerry propaganda is the same thing as denying the Holocaust.

Wait a second, did I miss something? Is John Kerry responsible for the Holocaust? That bastard!

He'd have to be to get me to vote for Bush.

And to the good people at Sinclair: Fuck you very much. Enjoy the federal investigation.


This post on the Narcissus Scale: 6.7


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 9:58 AM