As a thoughtful and careful film viewer, I’m certain that Roger Ebert would notice a conspicuous continuity error in a movie, so at first I was surprised that he didn’t notice the glaring inconsistency in his own column (“Stern belongs on radio just as much as Rush,” Chicago Sun-Times, April 16, 2004). In paragraph two, Mr. Ebert states “Unlike millions of Americans I do not listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio,” yet only a few paragraphs later he speaks of Mr. Limbaugh’s on-air “campaigns to throw the book at drug addicts.” The juxtaposition of these two statements is like a movie scene in which a character has a flashback and recalls situations that he never witnessed, you know, like Richard Clarke. How exactly does he know?
As I said, at first I was taken aback at this blatant mistake, until, that is, I re-read the column. That’s when I realized that Mr. Ebert analyzes the current FCC crackdown through the prism of his leftwing ideology, and therefore that it is based on a series of hackneyed clichés, myths and other misinformation. Let me set him straight.
Mr. Ebert states that “the right wing, secure in its own right to offend now wants to punish Stern to the point where he may be forced off the air.” As a proud member of the vast right-wing conspiracy, I can assure Mr. Ebert that we do not want Mr. Stern removed from the public airwaves. In fact, both Rush Limbaugh and I have so stated repeatedly on the air. I share Mr. Ebert’s opinion that “[t]he whole nation cannot be held hostage so that everything on the radio is suitable for 9 year-olds.” Trying to take away people’s money and freedom because we need to “protect the children?” I don’t think so. That’s a liberal gambit, and an annoying one at that.
I can’t blame Mr. Ebert for not following this latest FCC foolishness as closely as those of us in radio. Had he been doing so, he would realize that it has NOTHING to do with President Bush’s desire to silence that great public policy wonk Howard Stern, his enthusiastic embrace of the victim role notwithstanding. The FCC received over 200,000 e-mails within 3 weeks of Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl ‘wardrobe malfunction’ complaining about its failure to control indecency on the public airwaves. It’s that simple. All the tin-foil hat club conspiracy theories featuring President Bush and his rich Texas friends working in concert with intellectually-stunted religious fanatics that the left find so compelling, and the rest of us find hilarious, don’t change that.
Up until very recently, the left believed that ‘indecency’ was a problem caused by one of their favorite bogeymen—let’s all say it together—MEDIA CONSOLIDATION. The evil suits at the behemoth Clear Channel were so out of touch with local communities that they were constantly assaulting local listeners with material that was indecent by local standards. When the liberals thought that media consolidation was the reason, they were more than willing to limit ‘freedom of speech’ to get back at business. Note the following from the salon.com article “Howard Stern Unplugged” by obvious left-leaning Eric Boehlert,
“The jock claims Bush has sold out to the religious right and ordered the FCC to crack down on broadcasters to appease his political base. He saves many of his most stinging barbs these days for Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose fundamentalist critique of popular culture puts Stern in mind of the black-robed jihadis Americ is fighting in the Middle East.
“Yet the politics of indecency are not so simple. For years, it has been the tow Democractic FCC commissioners, Michael Cops and Jonathan Adelstein, whopressed for tougher indecency fines, while Powell, a liberatarian-leaning Republican, adopted a more hands-off, let-the-marketplace-decide approach to the problem. During the fierce debate last wummer about whether the F CC should allow even further media consolidation—a trend that Powell supports—the Democratic commissioners argued that rampant consolidation had already led to raunchier programming, particularly in radio, where corporate owners rarely operate locally and often aren’t sensitive to community standards.”
Now, all of a sudden, their villain has changed and they are outraged. Here we go again with the feigned moral outrage.
When writing about politics, Mr. Ebert often finds himself like Leonardo DeCaprio’s character in “Titanic,” that is, in over his head.
As I said, at first I was taken aback at this blatant mistake, until, that is, I re-read the column. That’s when I realized that Mr. Ebert analyzes the current FCC crackdown through the prism of his leftwing ideology, and therefore that it is based on a series of hackneyed clichés, myths and other misinformation. Let me set him straight.
Mr. Ebert states that “the right wing, secure in its own right to offend now wants to punish Stern to the point where he may be forced off the air.” As a proud member of the vast right-wing conspiracy, I can assure Mr. Ebert that we do not want Mr. Stern removed from the public airwaves. In fact, both Rush Limbaugh and I have so stated repeatedly on the air. I share Mr. Ebert’s opinion that “[t]he whole nation cannot be held hostage so that everything on the radio is suitable for 9 year-olds.” Trying to take away people’s money and freedom because we need to “protect the children?” I don’t think so. That’s a liberal gambit, and an annoying one at that.
I can’t blame Mr. Ebert for not following this latest FCC foolishness as closely as those of us in radio. Had he been doing so, he would realize that it has NOTHING to do with President Bush’s desire to silence that great public policy wonk Howard Stern, his enthusiastic embrace of the victim role notwithstanding. The FCC received over 200,000 e-mails within 3 weeks of Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl ‘wardrobe malfunction’ complaining about its failure to control indecency on the public airwaves. It’s that simple. All the tin-foil hat club conspiracy theories featuring President Bush and his rich Texas friends working in concert with intellectually-stunted religious fanatics that the left find so compelling, and the rest of us find hilarious, don’t change that.
Up until very recently, the left believed that ‘indecency’ was a problem caused by one of their favorite bogeymen—let’s all say it together—MEDIA CONSOLIDATION. The evil suits at the behemoth Clear Channel were so out of touch with local communities that they were constantly assaulting local listeners with material that was indecent by local standards. When the liberals thought that media consolidation was the reason, they were more than willing to limit ‘freedom of speech’ to get back at business. Note the following from the salon.com article “Howard Stern Unplugged” by obvious left-leaning Eric Boehlert,
“The jock claims Bush has sold out to the religious right and ordered the FCC to crack down on broadcasters to appease his political base. He saves many of his most stinging barbs these days for Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose fundamentalist critique of popular culture puts Stern in mind of the black-robed jihadis Americ is fighting in the Middle East.
“Yet the politics of indecency are not so simple. For years, it has been the tow Democractic FCC commissioners, Michael Cops and Jonathan Adelstein, whopressed for tougher indecency fines, while Powell, a liberatarian-leaning Republican, adopted a more hands-off, let-the-marketplace-decide approach to the problem. During the fierce debate last wummer about whether the F CC should allow even further media consolidation—a trend that Powell supports—the Democratic commissioners argued that rampant consolidation had already led to raunchier programming, particularly in radio, where corporate owners rarely operate locally and often aren’t sensitive to community standards.”
Now, all of a sudden, their villain has changed and they are outraged. Here we go again with the feigned moral outrage.
When writing about politics, Mr. Ebert often finds himself like Leonardo DeCaprio’s character in “Titanic,” that is, in over his head.