Hello All,

Just wanted to continue the "Freedom of Speech Under Attack" thread from the Kerry/Edwards forum. That thread was the most popular on the site, with well over 33,000 hits. I hope we can continue as a support network to monitor the government's actions so they cannot undermine our rights guaranteed by the greatest document of freedom, the Constitution. Unfortunately, the present inept Administration shows contempt for this document; it wouldn't surprise me if those in shrub's office use it for toilet paper!

We can use this site also to keep a watchful eye on the media, which sadly, has been silent and sleeping during the last 4 years. In fact, Tommy Franks, the former commander of the war in Iraq, stated that he viewed the media as a friend, not the traditional view that the media is to bu unbiased and ask the tough questions.

Finally, we can use this thread for fellow Stern fans as Howard continues his fight to support your right to speak freely. And, when he goes to Sirius, he will truly be free!

OP-ED COLUMNIST - New York Times November 10

Our Not-So-Free Press
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF





Paging China! Help us! Urge the U.S. government to respect freedom of the press!

It does sound topsy-turvy, doesn't it? Generally, it's China and Zimbabwe that are throwing journalists in prison, while the U.S. denounces the repression over there.

But now similar abuses are about to unfold within the United States, part of an alarming new pattern of assault on American freedom of the press. In the last few months, three different U.S. federal judges, each appointed by President Ronald Reagan, have found a total of eight journalists in contempt of court for refusing to reveal confidential sources, and the first of them may go to prison before the year is out. Some of the rest may be in prison by spring.

The first reporter likely to go to jail is Jim Taricani, a television reporter for the NBC station in Providence, R.I. Mr. Taricani obtained and broadcast, completely legally, a videotape of a city official as he accepted an envelope full of cash.

U.S. District Judge Ernest Torres found Mr. Taricani in contempt for refusing to identify the person he got the videotape from, and the judge fined him $1,000 a day. That hasn't broken Mr. Taricani, so Judge Torres has set a hearing for Nov. 18 to decide whether to squeeze him further by throwing him in jail.

Then there's Patrick Fitzgerald, the overzealous special prosecutor who is the Inspector Javert of our age. Mr. Fitzgerald hasn't made any progress in punishing the White House officials believed to have leaked the identity of the C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame to Robert Novak. But Mr. Fitzgerald seems determined to imprison two reporters who committed no crime, Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time, because they won't blab about confidential sources.

Federal District Judge Thomas Hogan is threatening to send them to prison; a hearing is set for Dec. 8. As for Mr. Novak, he is in no apparent jeopardy, for reasons that remain unclear.

Then there's a third case, a civil suit between the nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee and the government. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson held five reporters who are not even parties to the suit in contempt for refusing to reveal confidential sources.

In yet another case, the Justice Department is backing a prosecutor's effort to get a record of telephone calls made by two New York Times reporters - uncovering all their confidential sources in the fall of 2001. Put all this together, and we're seeing a broad assault on freedom of the press that would appall us if it were happening in Kazakhstan.

Responsibility lies primarily with the judges rather than with the Bush administration, except for the demand for phone records and for the appointment of Inspector Javert as special prosecutor. But it's probably not a coincidence that we're seeing an offensive against press freedoms during an administration that has a Brezhnevian fondness for secrecy.

We journalists are in this mess partly because we're widely seen as arrogant and biased, and we need to wrestle seriously with those issues. But when reporters face jail for doing their jobs, the ultimate victim is the free flow of information, the circulatory system of any democracy.

The Chinese government recently arrested Zhao Yan, a research assistant for The New York Times in Beijing, and the Bush administration has been very helpful about protesting the case. Maybe Colin Powell can work out a deal: the Chinese government will stop imprisoning journalists if the U.S. government will do the same.

Protecting confidential sources has been a sacred ethical precept in publishing ever since John Twyn was arrested in 1663 for printing a book that offended the king. Twyn refused to reveal the name of the book's author, so he was publicly castrated and disemboweled, and his limbs severed from his body. Each piece of his body was nailed to a London gate or bridge.

So, on the bright side, we have evidently progressed.

In May, Iran's secret police detained me in Tehran and demanded that I identify a revolutionary guard I had quoted as saying "to hell with the mullahs." My interrogators threatened to imprison me unless I revealed my source. But after a standoff, the Iranian goons let me go. Imprisoning Western journalists for protecting their sources was too medieval, even for them. Let's hope the U.S. judicial system shows the same restraint as those Iranian thugs.

I'm definitely the activist for freedom of speech! Need it more than ever! :o

Dear MoveOn member,

Questions are swirling around whether the election was conducted honestly or not. We need to know -- was it or wasn't it?

If people were wrongly prevented from voting, or if legitimate votes were mis-counted or not counted at all, we need to know so the wrongdoers can be held accountable, and so we can prevent this from happening again.

Members of Congress are demanding an investigation to answer this question. The decision on whether or not there will be an investigation could come as soon as Monday. Join us in supporting the call for one now, at:

http://www.moveon.org/investigatethevote/

Then please invite your friends and colleagues to sign, as well. We need to show Congress that hundreds of thousands of Americans are serious about protecting the integrity of the vote.
We're all hearing the stories and wondering what's true and what isn't. But at least two cases of serious problems are accepted beyond doubt:


In Broward County, Florida, electronic voting machines counted backwards: as more people voted, the official vote count went down. [1]


In one Columbus, Ohio suburb, election officials have acknowledged that electronic voting machines credited Bush with winning 4,258 votes, even though only 638 people voted there. [2]


These are just cases where we know something went wrong. There were also lots of reports of people being denied ballots on Election Day. So far, these reports remain anecdotal, but they must be compiled and examined. And the Internet is abuzz with theories about why the official counts were so different from the exit polls.

Do you have a story? Were you prevented from voting? Tell us, at:

http://www.moveon.org/investigatethevote/

Six prominent members of Congress have called for an investigation. Representatives Conyers (D-MI), Holt (D-NJ), Nadler (D-NY), Scott (D-VA), Watt (D-NC) and Wexler (D-FL), have demanded that the U.S. General Accounting Office:

immediately undertake an investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election, how election officials responded to difficulties they encountered, and what we can do in the future to improve our election systems and administration. [3]
We've got to support their call by asking our own Representatives and Senators to join them.

If you have a personal story of disenfranchisement, tell us. These members of Congress have agreed to include our stories and comments in their call for an investigation. Please sign now -- we'll deliver our compiled statements to them on Friday.

Even if you don't have a personal story, your signature on our petition will still help build support for an investigation.

To keep our faith in democracy, we need to know the facts. Your signature, and your story if you have one, will help.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

--Carrie, Joan, Lee, Marika, Noah, Peter, Rosalyn, and Wes
The MoveOn.org Team
November 11th, 2004

glad to have you on board! spread the word!

Ironically, I quit the Kerry/Edwards forum because of that very issue: I was having my posts edited or deleted without any due process or explanation why. Though I was supportive of Kerry on most other issues, my posts were about how to resolve my main problem with Kerry: his very weak stance on defending Taiwan.

I'm hoping I can continue to post within this forum if I can be assured it'll be moderated more fairly.

I don't see the connection with free speech and Taiwan, but welcome! I know early on with the forum, Iwas frustrated with some actions that were edited, but people who spewed their anti-Semitic, and other racist garbage (too many nuts to mention) were given impunity. Go figure. While i support free speech, it doesn't mean you can yell fire in a crowded theater when none exists. And there's a difference between free speech and hate speech.

The connection is that the principles of free speech weren't upheld at the Kerry forums.

I never use hate speech, and I was only asking for guidance on his stance towards China/Taiwan relations. Like I wrote before (and I explained in the Kerry forums) in general I like Kerry much more than Bush. But I had some links to other sites in my posts (other posters had asked me to verify what I was claiming Kerry's stance was) which they removed with the claim that linking was against their policy. This would have been ok if they'd been consistent, but there were several other links in other forums. I can only conclude that the other links were allowed because each one of them were were only supportive of Kerry and his policies.

The moderators of the forum I was posting in were hypocrites.

be careful, some of those same folks are over here too. I got a post edited early on when I called cheney a hypocrite. always challenge them, i found they do respond (generally) but it doesn't necessarily mean that's the last straw.

Remember, the election is NOT officially over until the electors meet next month. As you know, voting irregualrities have been reported in OH, FL, and even in states like GA and NC. Only Keith Olbermann is following this story, the rest of the news and cable TV newscasts have been as always, just marching to the tune of Dumbya and VP Haliburton.

Here's how you can make a diffrence. Pass this on:

"ADOPT A DISTRICT"

There are 11,000 districts in the state of Ohio and there is a $10 filing fee for each district required in order for a re-count of the votes to take place. The only thing needed for a re-count to take place is for a losing Presidential candidate to demand a re-count and cough up the $110,000 in order to do it (11,000 districts multiplied by $10). This week the Green Party candidate for President asked for a re-count. Now the Liberterian Party's candidate has asked for a re-count. That's two. All they needed was one. John Kerry keeps his head above water, playing a waiting game letting everyone else make the necessary moves. Don't think the Fallujah assault was planned right after the election as a mere coincidence. Any yapping on Kerry's part about losing and they would've tarred and feathered him. John Kerry's brother, Cameron, has been very involved in coordinating this.

According to Laura Flanders on Saturday evening's Air America show (11/13), they have already raised about half of the money. Won't you consider "adopting" a district for only $10, or five districts ($50), or ten districts ($100)..........you get the picture. It's well within reach and only ten dollars ( give up a couple day's worth of frappa-lappe-crappa-lottas from Starbucks). I understand the cynicism if you can't be bothered to give another penny, but I ask that you at least forward this e-mail to friends/relatives sympathetic to the cause. Even by doing that little gesture, you might end up taking part, by someone else contributing because you forwarded this.

Here is the link:

http://www.thealliancefordemocracy.org/htm...g/2138-AA.shtml[/COLOR]

This is very serious. I hope everyone here will write there Congressmen!

Please take urgent action TO STOP THE PASSAGE OF THE Constitution Restoration Act of 2004 and the House Subcommittee on Select Education unanimously approved H.R. 3077, the International Studies in Higher Education Act whose abject purpose is to silence any CRITICISM of Israel! Any consideration of this in any sub-committee is just beyond the pale.

from what I hear, the OH recount is going on. However, I would caution that this will change the unfortunate result of Nov. 2. We may have to come to terms of another 4 years of the bush/cheney nightmare. There is hope- now that the repubs have to pander to the religious right, this may cause some in the party to feud amongst tehmselves and they'll only have themselves to blame. Afterall, they can't keep blaming Clinton! Also looming on the horizon is the FBI's investigation of haliburton and dick cheney. We have a fight on our hands and must remain vigilant and not let those who are reckless wipe their behinds with our Constitiution!

I've checked this bill on thomas.org and haven't seen the anti-Israel language you claim. Maybe I missed it, so could you be specific?

Also, FYI, it is disrespectful to show the flag upside-down.

FCC...a shadowy federal agency

Columnist Jeff Jarvis called in to tell Howard about some independent research he did on the FCC. He said that the FCC claimed to have gotten 159 complaints about an episode of FOX's "Married by America', but in truth, the number of people complaining were much lower. Jarvis said when he requested the information, the FCC immediately admitted the number of complaints was just 90, still a low number to warrant the single largest fine against a TV show in the history of the FCC. Then the FCC admitted that the 90 complaints really only came from 23 people!!! After Jarvis read the letters, he concluded that out of those 23 complaints, 21 of them were written pretty much exactly the same, meaning they were just Xeroxed letters!!!! That meant that only about 3 people were responsible for the FCC fining FOX $1.2 million. Howard loved that information and asked Jarvis to find out exactly what kind of "investigation" the FCC supposedly ran against Viacom that led them to conclude that Viacom knew about the Janet Jackson stunt ahead of time. Jarvis said he'd get back to Howard on that.

There needs to be a SubTopic Somewhere in this Forum devoted to FCC rulings, or 1st amendment rights. Michael Powell falls in line with Bush & Co in his decisions.


Where is Larry Flynt when you need him?

this is a perfect spot to keep tabs up on that shadowy group. do you think they'll fine abc for that desperate housewives promo on mon night football? RIDICULOUS!!! and abc caved and apologized, what wimps!!

who'd ever thought those that value free speech would look up to larry flynt as a hero! right message, wrong messenger. maybe he can dig up some dirt on colin powell, jr and some repubs

also, keep an eye out for joe upton, who heads the House committee that checks on the fcc- as well as the usual villians- brownback, et al

The day after the Janet Jackson stunt.Howard Stern went on the air and said" it's all over". Free speach will be squashed and the media as we know it will die. He couldn't have been more right. He has predicted everything that is going on the media almost to the day.
When the houses give that indecency bill to the president to sign it will be all over and the FCC will have all the power it needs to do anything they want.

WE are screwed !

I'm a Stern Fan and a Michael Moore fan.

Freedom speech and thought is our most precious right.

USE IT!

This should send a shiver down your spine. The Ayatollah wing of the repub party is clearly in control, and they're out to get free speech taken away. First, they started with Howard, but many, especially those in the media, ignored Howard because as some described him (wrongly) as "potty-mouthed" or nothing but "fart jokes," well, this should get hese folks thinking again. A journalist convicted for refusing to reveal his source, another case is pending soon, and there are more journalists facing charges under the Der Furher regime of GWB than ever before in history. God help us!

November 19, 2004
Reporter Convicted for Refusing to Give Identity of a Source
By PAM BELLUCK

ROVIDENCE, R.I., Nov. 18 - A local television reporter was convicted of criminal contempt on Thursday for refusing to identify the person who leaked him an F.B.I. videotape in 2001 related to an investigation of government corruption in Providence.

Jim Taricani, a longtime investigative reporter for WJAR, an NBC affiliate, faces the possibility of up to six months in jail when he is sentenced on Dec. 9.

Mr. Taricani would be one of only a handful of journalists to go to jail for refusing to identify a source. He is also one of several reporters currently facing court action over their refusal to reveal confidential sources, but he is the only one to go on trial on criminal contempt charges.

"When I became a reporter 30 years ago, I never imagined that I would be put on trial and face the prospect of going to jail simply for doing my job," Mr. Taricani said outside the courthouse after Judge Ernest C. Torres, chief judge of the Federal District Court in Providence, pronounced him guilty.

Mr. Taricani, a gray-haired 55-year-old who has won several awards, including four Emmys, added: "I wish all my sources could be on the record, but when people are afraid, a promise of confidentiality may be the only way to get the information to the public, and in some cases, to protect the well-being of the source. I made a promise to my source, which I intend to keep."

Mr. Taricani, who had two heart attacks 18 years ago and who received a heart transplant in 1996, said his major concern about going to jail was his health.

The judge said that while he was aware that Mr. Taricani "requires special care," he was also aware that Mr. Taricani "has continued to live a very active life" and had "traveled abroad recently." Judge Torres said that there were prison hospitals that had "successfully managed the needs of heart transplant patients."

Mr. Taricani was convicted in connection with a long-running federal investigation called Operation Plunderdome, which resulted in the conviction of at least nine city officials, including Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr., who was sentenced to 64 months for racketeering conspiracy.

Mr. Cianci's top aide, Frank E. Corrente, was also convicted on corruption charges, in part for taking a $1,000 bribe from a businessman who was acting as an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and was secretly videotaping his transaction with Mr. Corrente.

Someone gave Mr. Taricani a copy of that videotape, and in February 2001, his station broadcast it, prompting Judge Torres to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate who had leaked the tape.

After the prosecutor interviewed 14 people, all of whom denied being the source, Judge Torres last March found Mr. Taricani in civil contempt. When that finding was upheld by an appeals court, Mr. Taricani was fined $1,000 for each day he continued to refuse to name his source.

When Mr. Taricani would not relent, two weeks ago, after he had paid $85,000 - for which he was reimbursed by his employer - Judge Torres changed the civil contempt case into a criminal contempt case. On Thursday, the judge was stern and declarative.

"The evidence," Judge Torres said "is clear and overwhelming and undisputed." He added, "the evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt that he is guilty of criminal contempt."

Mr. Taricani's lawyers did not say whether they planned an appeal, which would be filed after sentence is passed.

Mr. Taricani's lawyers had argued that he was protected by the First Amendment, and said broadcasting the tape had not affected the defendants' ability to have a fair trial, since its existence had been made public in an indictment months earlier.

Judge Torres said his sentencing decision could be swayed by how Mr. Taricani responded to a question about whether he knew that the person giving him the tape was doing so illegally. Mr. Taricani said he and his lawyers had not yet decided whether to answer that question.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of The Reporter's Committee for Freedom of the Press, said Mr. Taricani's case was unusual because he faced the jail time not to force him to reveal his source, but as punishment for refusing to do so.

Ms. Dalglish said his case - along with those involving a Central Intelligence Agency officer, Valerie Plame, and a government nuclear physicist, Wen Ho Lee - suggest that there is "an atmosphere where the government is keeping a lot more secrets, the courts are keeping a lot more secrets, and you've got whistleblowers and other people who are within the government seeing something going on who say 'You know, I really feel this information should get out.' ''

Much of the attention has centered on the case of Ms. Plame. Government prosecutors have been trying to learn who leaked Ms. Plame's identity to Robert Novak, a syndicated columnist. A reporter for The New York Times, Judith Miller, who never published an article about Ms. Plame, has been held in contempt by a federal judge for refusing to name people she interviewed about the subject.

Matthew Cooper, a White House correspondent for Time magazine who did write about her case, was also held in contempt and threatened with up to 18 months in jail.

Both reporters are appealing the decisions.

As a result of these cases, Senator Christopher Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, hopes to introduce a bill calling for a national shield law, said a spokesman, Marvin Fast. Shield laws, which are on the books in 31 states, protect journalists from having to reveal confidential sources.

If Mr. Taricani is sent to a jail hospital, he may end up in Fort Devens, Mass. - the same place where Mr. Corrente is serving his sentence of 5 years and three months.

On Thursday, Mr. Taricani, who is well known in Rhode Island, where he is on the boards of the Providence Public Library, a food bank and an organ donor association, was asked how it felt to sit at the defense table in the same courtroom where he had once covered the cases of Mr. Corrente and others.

"It's not a nice seat to sit in," Mr. Taricani said. But, he added, when asked about his decision, "I have no regrets whatsoever."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

glad to have you on board! we'll be VERY busy protecting our rights these next 4 years!

This blurb comes from the "Late Show WIth David Letterman." Unfortunately, I missed the show as I was sleeping, but heard Howard's appearance was great!

HOWARD STERN: Paul played "Let's Get Serious" for Howard's entrance. For those who may not know, Howard Stern announced last month he is leaving commercial radio and heading to the new and exciting satellite radio network, Sirius. Paul's "Let's Get Serious" was for his move to Sirius radio. Howard and his show have been coming under lots of scrutiny lately, especially since the nation's "outrage" over the Janet Jackson incident at the Super Bowl. (Have we recovered yet? I know I never will. I still have an eye twitch that I can't control because of it.) The government and the FCC have fined him and his radio stations for the show's content and promises to continue to fine him for whenever he over steps the boundaries? What are those boundaries? Nobody knows. The boundaries are always changing. What Howard was doing a year ago is no longer allowed today. What the FCC thought was fine 5 years ago is deemed inappropriate today and is going back NOW fining Howard for stuff he did in the last century. The censorship and scrutiny is making Howard's job very difficult.
Howard had a lot to say tonight and he was getting it out.
Dave says that he was surprised to learn that Clear Channel owns 1,200 radio stations across the country, practically cornering the market in radio, and now can determine what we hear. Three companies own 60% of all the radio stations! (Sounds like the Wal-Marting of America)
Howard lauds the future of satellite radio. It'll give him the freedom to do and say what he wants and offering him the outlet to create exciting radio. And the listener will be able to hear what he wants to hear. There are 120 commercial-free channels on Sirius radio! I laughed when Howard gave the example of just how much variety is offered. "If you like Bluegrass Country music from the 60's, not the 70's or 80's, but from the 60's, you can get it commercial free." There's also a station for 70's bluegrass and 80's bluegrass. Sirius has got it all.

Right about this time we got a phone call in the shack from one of the writers: "Mel Karmazin was just signed as the new CEO of Sirius." Wow! Breaking news happening right in front of us.

Sirius radio --- it's the future! Get the Sirius radio box for about $150. Getting the Sirius signal will run you $12.95 a month, or about 40 cents a day.

Howard is scheduled to come to Sirius in January of 2006. Dave asks, "Is the entire show going with you? Will Bababooey be there?" Howard assures that everyone is coming to the new place.

Howard Stern knows very well that what he did was outside the guidelines of the law. He loves the publicity he gets from this. It helps him make more money. Anyone crying government censorship can find much better cases to champion besides this one. Howard's case is utter b.s.

Howard's a corporation, and he's milking the public. The FCC is getting heat for rightfully coming down on him--but they're probably loving it because they're getting away with other instances where are are truly screwing the public interest.

The truth is that he's doing this on public airwaves. Again--on PUBLIC airwaves. Just like a public park. Just like a public street. If a person came to a public park to entertain people, then started interviewing porno stars and asking about anal sex in front of families, do you think he wouldn't be aware that some int he audience would think it was inappripriate? He doesn't own the radio frequency he broadcasts on. We all do. Furthermore, he knows that the FCC only takes actions based on listener complaints--OUR complaints.

So his argument that the FCC is being less than clear is specious. It has always acted on the complaints of the public.

Do any of Howard's fans know about this? I doubt it. The fact is that Clear Channel and the radio stations that broadcast his show don't OWN the bandwidth that he broadcasts on. It's LICENSED to them by the government. Basically for free. Why is this? Because we decided long ago that the airwaves are owned by the people--not by any corporation (by the way, do any of you think Howard hasn't incorporated his own business?). If the government wanted to drop the regulations and sell off the radio bandwidth it could make a hell of a lot more money.

People should be able to discuss the things that Howard's show talks about. But the forum for discussing graphic sex shouldn't be one that is easily marketed to children. I'd like to drive my kids to school and listen to the radio without having to constantly change channels or having to explain what anal sex is.

Howard Stern moving to satellite is the best thing. In that format he can broadcast whatever he wants, and families can listen to the radio. Otherwise we should charge the broadcast industry the billions of dollars in rental fees for the bandwidth they use.

Here's a little background you might want to read.

[quote=KillYourTV,Nov 21 2004, 04:47 PM]
Howard Stern knows very well that what he did was outside the guidelines of the law. He loves the publicity he gets from this. It helps him make more money. Anyone crying government censorship can find much better cases to champion besides this one. Howard's case is utter b.s.

Howard's a corporation, and he's milking the public. The FCC is getting heat for rightfully coming down on him--but they're probably loving it because they're getting away with other instances where are are truly screwing the public interest.

The truth is that he's doing this on public airwaves. Again--on PUBLIC airwaves. Just like a public park. Just like a public street. If a person came to a public park to entertain people, then started interviewing porno stars and asking about anal sex in front of families, do you think he wouldn't be aware that some int he audience would think it was inappripriate? He doesn't own the radio frequency he broadcasts on. We all do. Furthermore, he knows that the FCC only takes actions based on listener complaints--OUR complaints.

So his argument that the FCC is being less than clear is specious. It has always acted on the complaints of the public.

Do any of Howard's fans know about this? I doubt it. The fact is that Clear Channel and the radio stations that broadcast his show don't OWN the bandwidth that he broadcasts on. It's LICENSED to them by the government. Basically for free. Why is this? Because we decided long ago that the airwaves are owned by the people--not by any corporation (by the way, do any of you think Howard hasn't incorporated his own business?). If the government wanted to drop the regulations and sell off the radio bandwidth it could make a hell of a lot more money.

People should be able to discuss the things that Howard's show talks about. But the forum for discussing graphic sex shouldn't be one that is easily marketed to children. I'd like to drive my kids to school and listen to the radio without having to constantly change channels or having to explain what anal sex is.

Howard Stern moving to satellite is the best thing. In that format he can broadcast whatever he wants, and families can listen to the radio. Otherwise we should charge the broadcast industry the billions of dollars in rental fees for the bandwidth they use.

First off, you're way off base here. The FCC has been very selective in what it terms indecent and who they go after. They have no answer to what constitutes indecency, sometimes waitng 2 or 3 years to rule. It's gotten worse under Ayatollah Shrub as he rules the FCC as his personal fiefdom under the incompetence of Micheal Powell (Colin Powell, Jr). The SUpremne Court can't even define indecency; when we allow a secretive govt agency to determine this is when we no longer live in a free society. Check out howardstern.com and compare Howard's tramscripts with Oprah's transcript on the same subject; Oprah's is far more graphic than Stern's and was shown at at ime when kids are unsupervised. On theother hand, Stern's show is on a time when families are together or the kids are at school. yet, the FCC calls Oprah "beloved" and Stern is a "lightning rod." Isn't that hypocritical???
[url=http://www.ntia.doc.gov/pubintadvcom/octmtg/krasnow.htm#I]Here's a little

[quote=teacher731,Nov 21 2004, 08:02 PM]
[quote=KillYourTV,Nov 21 2004, 04:47 PM]
Howard Stern knows very well that what he did was outside the guidelines of the law. He loves the publicity he gets from this. It helps him make more money. Anyone crying government censorship can find much better cases to champion besides this one. Howard's case is utter b.s.

Howard's a corporation, and he's milking the public. The FCC is getting heat for rightfully coming down on him--but they're probably loving it because they're getting away with other instances where are are truly screwing the public interest.

The truth is that he's doing this on public airwaves. Again--on PUBLIC airwaves. Just like a public park. Just like a public street. If a person came to a public park to entertain people, then started interviewing porno stars and asking about anal sex in front of families, do you think he wouldn't be aware that some int he audience would think it was inappripriate? He doesn't own the radio frequency he broadcasts on. We all do. Furthermore, he knows that the FCC only takes actions based on listener complaints--OUR complaints.

So his argument that the FCC is being less than clear is specious. It has always acted on the complaints of the public.

Do any of Howard's fans know about this? I doubt it. The fact is that Clear Channel and the radio stations that broadcast his show don't OWN the bandwidth that he broadcasts on. It's LICENSED to them by the government. Basically for free. Why is this? Because we decided long ago that the airwaves are owned by the people--not by any corporation (by the way, do any of you think Howard hasn't incorporated his own business?). If the government wanted to drop the regulations and sell off the radio bandwidth it could make a hell of a lot more money.

People should be able to discuss the things that Howard's show talks about. But the forum for discussing graphic sex shouldn't be one that is easily marketed to children. I'd like to drive my kids to school and listen to the radio without having to constantly change channels or having to explain what anal sex is.

Howard Stern moving to satellite is the best thing. In that format he can broadcast whatever he wants, and families can listen to the radio. Otherwise we should charge the broadcast industry the billions of dollars in rental fees for the bandwidth they use.

First off, you're way off base here. The FCC has been very selective in what it terms indecent and who they go after. They have no answer to what constitutes indecency, sometimes waitng 2 or 3 years to rule. It's gotten worse under Ayatollah Shrub as he rules the FCC as his personal fiefdom under the incompetence of Micheal Powell (Colin Powell, Jr). The SUpremne Court can't even define indecency; when we allow a secretive govt agency to determine this is when we no longer live in a free society. Check out howardstern.com and compare Howard's tramscripts with Oprah's transcript on the same subject; Oprah's is far more graphic than Stern's and was shown at at ime when kids are unsupervised. On theother hand, Stern's show is on a time when families are together or the kids are at school. Stern was fined; Oprah wasn't.yet, the FCC calls Oprah "beloved" and Stern is a "lightning rod." And don't tell me Oprah is "informative." She's just as exploitative as all TV shows that use sex to sell during sweeps. If you want informative without the exploitation that Oprah and all those other talk shows use, you have to go to PBS! The FCC is a hypocritical, arbitrary agency with little oversight. The FCC is a threat to our democracy and children, not Howard Stern.
[url=http://www.ntia.doc.gov/pubintadvcom/octmtg/krasnow.htm#I]Here's a little

[/quote]

Our media is really showing its true color- yellow!!! Thank God for cable and now satellite radio. Everything else is gonna be as bland as Lawrence Welk, as talentless as Clay Aiken and the Simpson Sisters, and as boring as Father Knows Best! ZZZZZZZZ!!!
A new low- not showing "Saving Private Ryan" on Veterans Day because they're weasles!!

November 21, 2004
FRANK RICH
Bono's New Casualty: 'Private Ryan'

s American soldiers were dying in Falluja, some Americans back home spent Veteran's Day mocking the very ideal our armed forces are fighting for ­ freedom. Ludicrous as it sounds, 66 ABC affiliates revolted against their own network and refused to broadcast "Saving Private Ryan." The reason: fear. Not fear of terrorism or fear of low ratings but fear that their own government would punish them for exercising freedom of speech.

If the Federal Communications Commission could slap NBC after Bono used an expletive to celebrate winning a Golden Globe, then not even Steven Spielberg's celebration of World War II heroism could be immune from censorship. The American Family Association, which mobilized the mob against "Ryan," was in full blaster-fax and e-mail rage. Its scrupulous investigation had found that the movie's soldiers not only invoked the Bono word 21 times but also, perhaps even more indecently, re-enacted "graphic violence" in the battle scenes. How dare those servicemen impose their filthy mouths and spilled innards on decent American families! In our new politically correct American culture, war is always heck.

The stations that refused to show the movie were not just in Baton Rouge and Biloxi but in cities like Boston, Detroit, Cleveland and Baltimore. For some reason, a number of them replaced "Ryan" with the 1986 movie "Hoosiers," the heartwarming tale of high school basketball players who claw their way to the championship in 1950's Indiana. But even Indiana and jocks have no immunity from the indecency cops in 2004. Less than 48 hours after "Hoosiers" supplanted the censored "Ryan," the Pittsburgh Panthers quarterback Tyler Palko used the Bono word in a live interview with NBC Sports's Tom Hammond after his team's upset of Notre Dame. Unless the F.C.C. wants to open a legal Pandora's box, it now has no choice but to apply the same principles to a victorious football player's spontaneous expletive that it did to a victorious rock star's.

For anyone who doubts that we are entering a new era, let's flash back just a few years. "Saving Private Ryan," with its "CSI"-style disembowelments and expletives undeleted, was nationally broadcast by ABC on Veteran's Day in both 2001 and 2002 without incident, and despite the protests of family-values groups. What has changed between then and now? A government with the zeal to control both information and culture has received what it calls a mandate. Media owners who once might have thought that complaints by the American Family Association about a movie like "Saving Private Ryan" would go nowhere are keenly aware that the administration wants to reward its base. Merely the threat that the F.C.C. might punish a TV station or a network is all that's needed to push them onto the slippery slope of self-censorship before anyone in Washington even bothers to act. This is McCarthyism, "moral values" style.

What makes the "Ryan" case both chilling and a harbinger of what's to come is that it isn't about Janet Jackson and sex but about the presentation of war at a time when we are fighting one. That some of the companies whose stations refused to broadcast "Saving Private Ryan" also own major American newspapers in cities as various as Providence and Atlanta leaves you wondering what other kind of self-censorship will be practiced next. If these media outlets are afraid to show a graphic Hollywood treatment of a 60-year-old war starring the beloved Tom Hanks because the feds might fine them, toy with their licenses or deny them permission to expand their empires, might they defensively soften their news divisions' efforts to present the graphic truth of an ongoing war? The pressure groups that are exercised by Bono and "Saving Private Ryan" are often the same ones who are campaigning to derail any news organization that's not towing the administration line in lockstep with Fox.

Even without being threatened, American news media at first sanitized the current war, whether through carelessness or jingoism, proving too credulous about everything from weapons of mass destruction to "Saving Private Lynch" to "Mission Accomplished." During the early weeks of the invasion, carnage of any kind was kept off TV screens, as if war could be cost-free. Once the press did get its act together and exercised skepticism, it came under siege. News organizations that report facts challenging the administration's version of events risk being called traitors. As with "Saving Private Ryan," the aim of the news censors is to bleach out any ugliness or violence. But because the war in Iraq, unlike World War II, is increasingly unpopular and doesn't have an assured triumphant ending, it must also be scrubbed of any bad news that might undermine its support among the administration's base. Thus the censors argue that Abu Ghraib, and now a marine's shooting of a wounded Iraqi prisoner in a Falluja mosque, are vastly "overplayed" by the so-called elite media.

President Bush tried to turn the campaign, in part, into a referendum on Hollywood's lack of a "heart and soul." Now that he's won, administration apparatchiks have declared his victory a repudiation not just of Hollywood's dream factory but of the news industry's reality factory. "The biggest loser was the mainstream media," wrote Peggy Noonan in an online analysis for The Wall Street Journal after Election Day. She predicted that institutions like the networks, The New York Times and, presumably, the print edition of her own newspaper (editorial page excepted) were on their way to being rendered extinct by "the blogosphere and AM radio and the Internet" ­ in other words, by opinion writers like herself.

In this diet of "news" championed by the right, there's no need for actual reporters who gather facts firsthand by leaving their laptops and broadcast booths behind and risking their lives to bear witness to what is actually happening on the ground in places like Falluja and Baghdad. The facts of current events can become as ideologically fungible as the scientific evidence supporting evolution. Whatever comforting version of events supports your politics is the "news."

The reductio ad absurdum of such a restricted news diet is Jim Bunning, the newly re-elected senator from Kentucky. During the campaign he drew a blank when asked to react to the then widely circulated story of an Army Reserve unit in Iraq, including one soldier from his own state, that refused to follow orders to carry out what it deemed a suicide fuel-delivery mission. "I don't read the paper" is how he explained his cluelessness. "I haven't done that for the last six weeks. I watch Fox News to get my information." That's his right as a private citizen, though even Fox had some coverage of that story. But as a senator, he has the power to affect decisions on the conduct of the war and to demand an accounting of the circumstances under which one of his own constituents was driven to revolt against his officers. Instead Mr. Bunning was missing in action.

He is, however, a role model of the compliant citizen the Bush administration wants, both in officialdom and out. In a memorable passage in Ron Suskind's pre-election article on the president in The New York Times Magazine, a senior White House adviser tells Mr. Suskind that there's no longer any need for the "reality-based community" epitomized by journalists. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," the adviser says. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." A test run of this approach dates at least as far back as May 2003, a week after the president declared the end of major combat operations. When a reporter told Donald Rumsfeld in a Pentagon press briefing that "journalists in Iraq report that a sense of public order is still lacking," the secretary of defense ridiculed journalists for showing only "slices of truth." The reconstruction effort, couldn't anyone see, was right on track.

The creation of this alternative reality has been perfected into an art form in Falluja. Almost everything the administration has said about this battle is at odds with the known facts. "There are over 3,000 Iraqi soldiers who are leading the activities," said the now outgoing deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, as the operation began and those Iraqi troops were paraded before the cameras. But as Edward Wong of The Times later reported, the Iraqis actually turned up in battle only after the hard work was done, their uniforms "spotless from not having done a lick of fighting." Meanwhile, another group of crack Iraqi trainees fled their posts in Mosul, allowing the insurgents, and possibly our current No. .1 evildoer, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to wreak havoc there while Americans were chasing their ghosts in Falluja.

Casualties are also now being whipped into an empire's idea of reality. "We don't do body counts," said Tommy Franks as we fought in Afghanistan in 2002 ­ an edict upheld in a press briefing in Iraq as recently as Nov. 9 by the American commander Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz. But only five days later, as the "reality-based" news spread that many of the insurgents had melted away before we got to them, that policy was sacrificed to the cause of manufacturing some good news to drive out the bad. Suddenly there was a body count of 1,200 to 1,600 insurgents in Falluja, even though reporters on the scene found, as The Times reported, "little evidence of dead insurgents in the streets and warrens where some of the most intense combat took place." By possibly inflating both body counts and the fighting prowess of the local army against guerrillas, the Bush administration is constructing a "Mission Accomplished II" that depends on a quiescent press (as well as on a public memory so short that it won't notice the similarity between the Falluja narrative and Tet).

As the crunch comes, we'll learn whether media companies will continue to test such Iraq war stories against "reality-based" reportage, or whether they'll kowtow to an emboldened administration, spurred on by its self-proclaimed mandate and its hard-right auxiliary groups, that can reward or punish them at will. For now the most dominant Falluja image has been that of the "Marlboro Man" ­ the Los Angeles Times photo of the brave American marine James Blake Miller, his face bloodied and soiled by combat, his expression resolute. It is, as Mr. Rumsfeld might say, a slice of truth. But other slices ­ like the airlifting of hundreds of American troops to Germany to be treated for the traumatic fallout of Falluja's graphic violence ­ are, like "Saving Private Ryan" on Veteran's Day, missing from too many Americans' screens.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[quote=KillYourTV,Nov 21 2004, 04:47 PM]
Howard Stern knows very well that what he did was outside the guidelines of the law. He loves the publicity he gets from this. It helps him make more money. Anyone crying government censorship can find much better cases to champion besides this one. Howard's case is utter b.s.

Howard's a corporation, and he's milking the public. The only response to this ridiculous statement is .



So his argument that the FCC is being less than clear is specious. It has always acted on the complaints of the public. many of these complaints you site come from one person who has nothing better to do with his time and makes money off people by claiming Stern is the devil. He then gets others to write the same exact complaint; most likely these people don't even listen to the show. So, how do you explain that over 2000 complaints were filed within a month of Oprah's "tossed salad" rebroadcast of March 18, and no action was undertaken? Other than Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" a joke of a complaint (500,000 out of 23 billion who watched the Super Bowl, an insignificant amount. In fact, an FCC Commissioner claims Ms Winfrey is a "beloved" figure! Where's objectivitiy at the FCC?? And how come the FCC never explains its actions in public??

Do any of Howard's fans know about this? I doubt it. The fact is that Clear Channel CLear Channel is nothing more than a monopolisitc corp favored by shrub and company, remember these are the folks that squeleched debate over the iraqi war, controls most venues in major cities and towns, and is the biggest reason for the soaring costs in going to a concert.and the radio stations that broadcast his show don't OWN the bandwidth that he broadcasts on. It's LICENSED to them by the government. Basically for free. Why is this? Because we decided long ago that the airwaves are owned by the people--the people do not own the aorwaves, if that were accurate, than the media wouldn't be in the hands of just 8 conglomerates.
People should be able to discuss the things that Howard's show talks about. But the forum for discussing graphic sex shouldn't be one that is easily marketed to children. I'd like to drive my kids to school and listen to the radio without having to constantly change channels or having to explain what anal sex is. No one is forcing you to listen to him, you do have other choices, do you want Big Brother to make your choice? maybe you shouldn't have a radio or tv then, if that's the case.
Howard Stern moving to satellite is the best thing. In that format he can broadcast whatever he wants, and families can listen to the radio. Otherwise we should charge the broadcast industry the billions of dollars in rental fees for the bandwidth they use. Again, you seem to think that the FCC is fair and impartial. In that you show either ignorance or naivete.

I also seriously doubt you support free speech, check at the beginning waht this forum is for and I suggest you leave.

That's ironic. You cry that free speech is being infringed, but you insist that I leave because what I'm writing is upsetting you?

Look-- I think you'd agree that it'd be better if we had a good old American argument: I'll tell you where I think you're wrong, and you tell me where you think I'm wrong. Hopefully we'll come out with something meaningful.



I totally agree with you on this. That's why I put the link in my post that addresses this problem.



See, that's the problem. A lot of people think that these big corporations DO own them. The problem is that the FCC and people like Michael Powell have relaxed FCC law to make it easier for these media conglomerates to grow. It used to be that there were limitations on ownership, and that a station had to show that it was responsive to the community it broadcast to if it wanted to keep its license.
THAT's the real problem.

I have the feeling we agree on a lot. What I don't agree with is the idea that Howard Stern is the real issue.

As for Saving Private Ryan (a movie I think they should show to every student in the U.S.) let me ask you this: isn't it odd that a major network cancels a show that they've already aired, and easily weathered the few complaints they got about the language in it? You don't think it's odd that the movie they picked is one that every veteran, senior citizen, or basically THE PERFECT VOTING DEMOGRAPHIC would be outraged to hear of it's cancellation? Does it occur to you that this is a very calculated move on the part of ABC to garner sympathy?

Lets say all the ABC affiliates/O&O stations aired the movie and the FCC received complaints. Can you imagine which FCC bureaucrat or Congressman would be stupid enough to back up a fine on ABC for airing that movie? Every veterans group would be lynching them in effigy.

Look, I have a huge problem with the FCC. But I have just as much (if not more) contempt for the growing media monopolies in our country--ABC/Disney included.



Except that there are other stations doing the exact same thing. The music I like to hear is being emcee'd by less-than-talented hosts whose imagination for amusement doesn't go beyond the mindset of a 13-year-old. These are PUBLIC airwaves, and they are broadcasting R to X-rated material--at a time that is easily accessed by children.

Let me give you a hypothetical situation: if you were to take your family to a park, and somebody set up a TV in the middle of the park and started playing a DVD of a porno movie, would you object?

[quote=KillYourTV,Nov 21 2004, 09:56 PM]
That's ironic. You cry that free speech is being infringed, but you insist that I leave because what I'm writing is upsetting you? You're not upsetting me becauuse you show how ignorant you are of the freedom of speech issue.
Look-- I think you'd agree that it'd be better if we had a good old American argument: I'll tell you where I think you're wrong, and you tell me where you think I'm wrong. Hopefully we'll come out with something meaningful.
I totally agree with you on this. That's why I put the link in my post that addresses this problem.
See, that's the problem. A lot of people think that these big corporations DO own them. The problem is that the FCC and people like Michael Powell have relaxed FCC law to make it easier for these media conglomerates to grow. It used to be that there were limitations on ownership, and that a station had to show that it was responsive to the community it broadcast to if it wanted to keep its license.
THAT's the real problem.

I have the feeling we agree on a lot. What I don't agree with is the idea that Howard Stern is the real issue. He's not and he has said so. He's been right all along, when the FCC went after him, no one in broadcasting or very few, stood up. And, just like he said, the govt is going after others. You, have made Stern an issue; I'm just a fan.

As for Saving Private Ryan (a movie I think they should show to every student in the U.S.) let me ask you this: isn't it odd that a major network cancels a show that they've already aired, and easily weathered the few complaints they got about the language in it? You don't think it's odd that the movie they picked is one that every veteran, senior citizen, or basically THE PERFECT VOTING DEMOGRAPHIC would be outraged to hear of it's cancellation? Does it occur to you that this is a very calculated move on the part of ABC to garner sympathy?

Lets say all the ABC affiliates/O&O stations aired the movie and the FCC received complaints. Can you imagine which FCC bureaucrat or Congressman would be stupid enough to back up a fine on ABC for airing that movie? Every veterans group would be lynching them in effigy.

Look, I have a huge problem with the FCC. But I have just as much (if not more) contempt for the growing media monopolies in our country--ABC/Disney included.
Except that there are other stations doing the exact same thing. The music I like to hear is being emcee'd by less-than-talented hosts whose imagination for amusement doesn't go beyond the mindset of a 13-year-old. These are PUBLIC airwaves, and they are broadcasting R to X-rated material--at a time that is easily accessed by children. Again, NOBODY IS FORCING YOU TO LISTEN TO STERN OR ANY OF HIS PALE, LAME IMITATORS!! Turn your dial to NPR, an oldies station, or most likely, some Evangelical one! You have choices as do I! You and the FCC should NOT have the power to make MY choice! That's what free speech is, and again, if you don't support this, or if you feel that Big Brother and Ayatollah George should determine what you watch or listen to, you are NOT A SUPPORTER OF 1ST AMENDMENT RIGHTS!! Maybe you'll feel more comfortable wher govt does tell you what to watch or listen to (just a partial list)
N Korea Saudi Arabia Cuba China...
Let me give you a hypothetical situation: if you were to take your family to a park, and somebody set up a TV in the middle of the park and started playing a DVD of a porno movie, would you object?

Ridiculous. Shows how ignorant you are. Heck, since this is a stupid question, I'd go watch and have the kids play on the swings! Thanks for your suggestion!

I never claimed anybody was. But the fact that morning radio is being filled with his "imitators" (some of which are a lot better than he is) means that the programming--programming that's being BROADCAST -- do you even know what that word means?--in my area is unacceptable to me and many of the people in my community. You don't seem to understand the principle difference between allowing indecent material and broadcasting indecent material.

And that's another big issue: community standards. What it means is that if the people where you live love his show, then the local station broadcasting it has no problem airing it. But if another community doesn't want it, then the station will not broadcast it if they want to keep their license. That means the stations have to know what their community wants. That means they have to get involved. That means they have to actually feel obligated to their audience. Like I wrote earlier, the alternative would be for the stations to PAY for the radio bandwidth they use.

Or how about this: how about you or I buy a transmitter and start our own radio show, and just blast out the signal that the local radio stations are using? What's to stop us from doing that?



Censorship? Why is it that I can see Howard on cable every night? What's been censored? Do you even know the difference between broadcast and cable/satellite?

And you have no idea of what limitations there are on free speech, do you? How about I broadcast a lie about somebody (libel/slander), encourage my listeners to go attack city hall (inciting a riot), or put on a live sex show at a local park (what would you call it?)?



Of course you don't want to answer the question. It might lead you down a course of enlightenment.

It makes no sense for me to further comment on your ignorance. You clearly demonstrate that, and your contempt for the Constitution. You'll be added to my ignore list, and I hope you take your contempt for freedom elsewhere.

Ignorance is defined as a lack of knowledge. Show me what you know. Prove me wrong. And stop aping Howard and think for yourself.

proof positive that you are nothing but an agitator. In case you forgot to read the intro to the thread, this is a forum that supports free speech and also to support Howard. I suggest you check with your boys rush and hannity and see if they a BB where you views would be welcomed with open arms.

Actually, you've posted a topic on a website that is about discussing issues. Barring the violation of the rules of this site, you have no right to dictate what opinions people give here. I have violated no rules.

Or do you believe this is supposed to be a forum that protects free speech, but only for those that support Howard Stern? (Are some pigs more equal than others?)

And why is it you think I support Rush and Hannity? Do you see the world as populated only by armies of people who only follow radio personalities? Are you unable to view people as being more complex than that? Why don't you ask more questions and actually find out what I support?

AGAIN: Show me what you know. Prove me wrong. Give me facts and a strong argument.

Actually, you are incorrect. It is a distress symbol and quite appropriate under the circumstances.

So, how long have you opposed freedom of expression?

This should be a very interesting week in the radio industry.

FCC & Viacom Settle For $3.5 Million On Outstanding Fines

FMQB Radio Industry News

Also,

Indecent Viacom Employees Face Immediate Suspention

FMQB Radio Industry News

And,

Thompson Asks For WQAM Lisence Revocation

FMQB Radio Industry News

Tomorrow mornings Howard Stern show promisses to be quite an event if they even bother to show up.
I don't know how Howard will deal with this latest news but it should be anything but boring.
His move to Sirius could come alot sooner than expected.

And finally,just for laughs or the last kick in the b*lls of Free Speach.

Boston Globe Calls For Powell As "Man Of THE YEAR"

FMQB Radio Industry News


Hey Dude,Where's My Country?

Tomorrow mornings Howard Stern show promisses to be quite an event if they even bother to show up.
I don't know how Howard will deal with this latest news but it should be anything but boring.
His move to Sirius could come alot sooner than expected.

And finally,just for laughs or the last kick in the b*lls of Free Speach.

Boston Globe Calls For Powell As "Man Of THE YEAR"

FMQB Radio Industry News
Hey Dude,Where's My Country?

[/quote]

Howard blasted, and rightly so, Viacom for paying fines of 3.5 mil to the "Commisar of Good Taste," Colin Powell, Jr and his anti-Constitution pack at teh FCC. Good news: Sirius has been having sales. It looks serious that we may be hearing Stern sooner on satellite than we thought! Just hope Artie, Robin, fred, et al are along for the ride as well.

THIS SAYS IT ALL!! FRANK RICH CERTAINLY KNOWS WHAT'S REALLY AN ISSUE HERE, AND IT'S NOT "INDECENCY"

November 28, 2004
FRANK RICH
The Great Indecency Hoax

H, the poor, suffering little children.

If we are to believe the outcry of the past two weeks, America's youth have been defiled en masse - again. This time the dirty deed was done by the actress Nicollette Sheridan, who dropped her towel in the cheesy promotional spot for the runaway hit "Desperate Housewives" that kicked off "Monday Night Football" on ABC. "I wonder if Walt Disney would be proud," said Michael Powell, the Federal Communications Commission chairman who increasingly fashions himself a commissar of all things cultural, from nipple rings to "Son of Flubber."

It's beginning to look a lot like "Groundhog Day." Ever since 22 percent of the country's voters said on Nov. 2 that they cared most about "moral values," opportunistic ayatollahs on the right have been working overtime to inflate this nonmandate into a landslide by ginning up cultural controversies that might induce censorship by a compliant F.C.C. and, failing that, self-censorship by TV networks. Seizing on a single overhyped poll result, they exaggerate their clout, hoping to grab power over the culture.

The mainstream press, itself in love with the "moral values" story line and traumatized by the visual exaggerations of the red-blue map, is too cowed to challenge the likes of the American Family Association. So are politicians of both parties. It took a British publication, The Economist, to point out that the percentage of American voters citing moral and ethical values as their prime concern is actually down from 2000 (35 percent) and 1996 (40 percent).

To see how the hucksters of the right work their scam, there could be no more illustrative example than the "Monday Night Football" episode in which Ms. Sheridan leaped into the arms of the Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Terrell Owens in order to give the declining weekly game (viewership is down 3 percent from 2003) a shot of Viagra. From the get-go, it was a manufactured scandal, as over-the-top as a dinner theater production of "The Crucible."

Rush Limbaugh, taking a break from the legal deliberations of his drug rap and third divorce, set the hysterical tone. "I was stunned!" he told his listeners. "I literally could not believe what I had seen. ... At various places on the Net you can see the video of this, and she's buck naked, folks. I mean when they dropped the towel she's naked. You see enough of her back and rear end to know that she was naked. There's no frontal nudity in the thing, but I mean you don't need that. ...I mean, there are some guys with their kids that sit down to watch 'Monday Night Football.' "

Yes, there are - some, anyway - but you wonder how many of them were as upset as Mr. Limbaugh, whose imagination led him to mistake a lower back for a rear end. (He also said that the Sheridan-Owens encounter reminded him of the Kobe Bryant case; let's not even go there.) The evidence suggests that Mr. Limbaugh's prurient mind is the exception, not the rule. Though seen nationwide, and as early as 6 p.m. on the West Coast, the spot initially caused so little stir that the next morning only two newspapers in the country, both in Philadelphia, reported on it. ABC's switchboards were not swamped by shocked viewers on Monday night. A spokesman for ABC Sports told The Philadelphia Inquirer that he hadn't received a single phone call or e-mail in the immediate aftermath of the broadcast.

Even the stunned Mr. Limbaugh, curiously enough, didn't get around to mounting his own diatribe until Wednesday. Mr. Owens's agent, David Joseph, says that the flood of complaints at his office and Mr. Owens's Web site also didn't start until more than 24 hours after the incident - late Tuesday and early Wednesday. Were any of these complainants actual victims (or even viewers) of "Monday Night Football" or were they just a mob assembled after the fact by "family" groups, emboldened by their triumph in smiting "Saving Private Ryan" from 66 ABC stations the week before? Though the F.C.C. said on Wednesday that it had received 50,000 complaints about the N.F.L. affair, it couldn't determine how many of them were duplicates - the kind generated by e-mail campaigns run by political organizations posting form letters ready to be clicked into cyberspace ad infinitum by anyone who has an index finger and two seconds of idle time.

Like the Janet Jackson video before it, the new N.F.L. sex tape was now being rebroadcast around the clock so we could revel incessantly in the shock of it all. "People were so outraged they had to see it 10 times," joked Aaron Brown of CNN, which was no slacker in filling that need in the marketplace. And yet when I spoke to an F.C.C. enforcement spokesman after more than two days of such replays, the agency had not yet received a single complaint about the spot's constant recycling on other TV shows, among them the highly rated talk show "The View," where Ms. Sheridan's bare back had been merrily paraded at the child-friendly hour of 11 a.m.

The hypocrisy embedded in this tale is becoming a national running gag. As in the Super Bowl brouhaha, in which the N.F.L. maintained it had no idea that MTV might produce a racy halftime show, the league has denied any prior inkling of the salaciousness on tap this time - even though the spot featured the actress playing the sluttiest character in prime time's most libidinous series and was shot with the full permission of one of the league's teams in its own locker room. Again as in the Jackson case, we are also asked to believe that pro football is what Pat Buchanan calls "the family entertainment, the family sports show" rather than what it actually is: a Boschian jamboree of bumping-and-grinding cheerleaders, erectile-dysfunction pageantry and, as Don Imus puts it, "wife-beating drug addicts slamming the hell out of each other" on the field.

But there's another, more insidious game being played as well. The F.C.C. and the family values crusaders alike are cooking their numbers. The first empirical evidence was provided this month by Jeff Jarvis, a former TV Guide critic turned blogger. He had the ingenious idea of filing a Freedom of Information Act request to see the actual viewer complaints that drove the F.C.C. to threaten Fox and its affiliates with the largest indecency fine to date - $1.2 million for the sins of a now-defunct reality program called "Married by America." Though the F.C.C. had cited 159 public complaints in its legal case against Fox, the documents obtained by Mr. Jarvis showed that there were actually only 90 complaints, written by 23 individuals. Of those 23, all but 2 were identical repetitions of a form letter posted by the Parents Television Council. In other words, the total of actual, discrete complaints about "Married by America" was 3.

Such letter-writing factories as the American Family Association's OneMillionMoms.com also exaggerate their clout in intimidating advertisers. They brag, for instance, that the retail chain Lowe's dropped its commercials on "Desperate Housewives" in response to their protests. But Lowe's was not an advertiser on the show; the advertiser who actually bought the commercial was Whirlpool, which plugged Lowe's as a retail outlet for its products under a co-branding arrangement. Another advertiser that the family-values mafia takes credit for chasing away, Tyson Foods, had only bought in for one episode of "Desperate Housewives" in the first place. It had long since been replaced by such Fortune 500 advertisers as Ford and McDonald's, each clamoring to pay three times as much for a 30-second spot ($450,000) as those early advertisers who bought time before the show had its debut and became an instant smash.

But perhaps the most revealing barometer of the real state of play in American culture in 2004 is "Desperate Housewives" itself. Conceived by Marc Cherry, who is described by Newsweek as a "somewhat conservative, gay Republican," it is a campy, well-made soap opera presenting suburban American family life as a fugue of dysfunction, malice and sex. It's not for nothing that its characters are seen running off to Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder retrospectives or that some of the episodes are named after Stephen Sondheim songs like "Who's That Woman?" and "Pretty Little Picture."

The children of Mr. Cherry's Wisteria Lane can be as poisonous as that small-town brat in Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt": one preadolescent girl is an extortionist and one teenage daughter all but pimps for her divorced mother. The career-driven husbands are as soulless as the office rats of Wilder's "Apartment," and their wives are, yes, as desperate as those in the Manhattan high-rises of Sondheim's "Company." Whatever else is to be said about "Desperate Housewives" - and I haven't missed an episode - it is not to be confused with the kind of entertainment that the Traditional Values Coalition wants to impose on the airwaves. It not only emulates HBO Sunday night hits like "Sex and the City" and "Six Feet Under" in its cheeky, sardonic tone but brushes right up against them in language and action.

In one recent show the most oversexed character on screen, a 17-year-old jock having an affair with a married woman, is revealed to be a member of his high school's "abstinence club." (Surely it was a coincidence that this revelation butted right up against a commercial for Ortho Tri-Cyclen, a prescription contraceptive.) In another, a wife collapsing under the burden of stay-at-home motherhood slugs her spouse when he contemplates not using a condom. Then there was the dinner party where another of the wives tries to humiliate her husband by telling the assembled that he "cries after he ejaculates."

"Desperate Housewives" is hardly a blue-state phenomenon. A hit everywhere, it is even a bigger hit in Oklahoma City than it is in Los Angeles, bigger in Kansas City than it is in New York. All those public moralists who wail about all the kids watching Ms. Sheridan on "Monday Night Football" would probably have apoplexy if they actually watched what Ms. Sheridan was up to in her own series - and then looked closely at its Nielsen numbers. Though children ages 2 to 11 make up a small percentage of the audience of either show, there are actually more in that age group tuning into Mr. Cherry's marital brawls (870,000) than into the N.F.L.'s fisticuffs (540,000). "Desperate Housewives" also ranks No. 5 among all prime-time shows for ages 12-17. ("Monday Night Football" is No. 18.) This may explain in part why its current advertisers include products like Fisher-Price toys, the DVD of "Elf" and the forthcoming Tim Allen holiday vehicle, "Christmas With the Kranks."

Those who cherish the First Amendment can only hope that the Traditional Values Coalition, OneMillionMoms.com, OneMillionDads .com and all the rest send every e-mail they can to the F.C.C. demanding punitive action against the stations that broadcast "Desperate Housewives." A "moral values" crusade that stands between a TV show this popular and its audience will quickly learn the limits of its power in a country where entertainment is god.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

I know you can fly it upright, or down as long as the blue shield is facing downward, but I never hear of flying it upside down as a distress signal. Do you have a source for this? Also to those of you who have the flag on your cars, it is trully disrepsectful to display a tattered flag- you should burn the flag, then bury the ashes.

FYI...

Stern fans... Howard's BB is now closed, it may come back later, but wonder if this is a sign of things or as he mentioned numerous times before, it was becoming tiresome with all the Beth bashers and obvious Howard haters/Bush Lovers who infiltrated the BB. Stay tuned.

http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/opini...orial-headlines

First Amendment assaults serve as warning


November 30, 2004

The glory of the First Amendment -- In proposing a federal law to protect reporters from government pressures, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd is targeting a serious problem. We don't think his measure is going to prevail, or that it would provide a perfect shield in any case. Nevertheless, it can advance the debate and, it is hoped, impel politicians and the public to consider the stakes.

Under Sen. Dodd's bill, reporters would not be forced to reveal their sources or their notes, photographs and other material in government inquiries. Most states already have some version of such a "shield law," but those only provide protection in state jurisdictions. Increasingly, federal investigations and subpoenas are targeting media members.

The flashpoints in the debate over press protections often involve big politicians and high-profile media, and we suspect much of the general public yawns or considers the matter mere infighting. But in fact "freedom of the press" wasn't designed for the interests of newspapers or broadcasters. It was part of the First Amendment -- lumped with rights of religion and free assembly -- because America's founders knew that if government has power to intimidate the press, it will abuse that power and will work to freeze the flow of information that belongs to citizens.

Secrecy in government is the deadly enemy of democracy. When reporters can breach that secrecy, the public gains.

"Congress shall make NO law" abridging the freedom of the press -- seems to offer pre-emptive protection against political pressures. But in fact the First Amendment has limits, and has always been subject to reshaping by the courts. The press is not free to libel anyone, nor to trample on the Sixth Amendment rights of the accused. National security is another limitation.

But beyond that, some politicians and prosecutors will always be trying to gnaw at First Amendment protections wherever they see a chance to do so.

Plenty of reporters have been subpoenaed by both state and federal investigators, and some have gone to jail or paid fines. And the issue keeps coming up. The "outing" of a CIA officer via a leak to a Washington columnist, widely speculated to be motivated by politics, has now led to subpoenas of reporters over the disclosure of sources. In Rhode Island, a television reporter was just recently convicted of criminal contempt for refusing to reveal who leaked him an FBI videotape of a politician taking a bribe. He faces jail time.

Under Sen. Dodd's bill, the federal courts, legislative or executive branch could not compel a journalist to reveal a source. Exceptions are provided in cases when it is critical to a legal issue, the information cannot be obtained anywhere else and an overriding public interest exists in the disclosure, according to reports on the Dodd bill.

We don't think this bill is very likely to pass the newly-elected Congress, and the current administration is no crusader for open government. Besides, in most cases, the Constitution and a bench that respects it will still protect journalists. However, it would be progress to see a very vigorous public debate on Sen. Dodd's bill. It can only help improve understanding of what's at stake in this vital issue.
Copyright © 2004, Southern Connecticut Newspapers, Inc.

email Sen Dodd at his website: http://dodd.senate.gov/webmail/

Dear Member,

America has never been more ready for a national debate on the failures of our media system.

We're still emerging from an election cycle that left many in a quandary about the mainstream media's supposed service to our democracy. Before these questions can be answered sufficiently, mainstream media services have moved on to business as usual -- serving up a toxic blend of news, entertainment and propaganda that is itself a testament to their demise as serious news sources.

It's time we put a stop to the media status quo. MediaChannel.org and our activist arm Media for Democracy stand ready to place you in the midst of the global campaign for a more democratic and diverse media system MediaChannel.org offers media critical news and information every day. Media for Democracy engages citizens in direct action to reform America's failed media system. In the last year, more than 75,000 people have joined us in what TomPaine.com has called the "best resource for anyone who hates being manipulated." I am pleased to count you as one of them.

We'll be contacting each of you soon with an outline of MediaChannel and Media for Democracy's objectives for the years ahead, with the hope that you will join us in an active discussion about making our future media more diverse, democratic and accountable to the public.

WMD in Theaters

Today, I am writing you about a new film that raises several of these issues. Directed by MediaChannel.org's "News Dissector" Danny Schechter, WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception) is a hard-hitting feature length documentary is inspired in part by Danny's study of mainstream media's reporting of the Iraq War. The film opens this weekend in selected theaters in three cities and soon will be "rolling out" nationwide.

Like Fahrenheit 911 and Outfoxed, WMD can reach large audiences with a powerful critique of a media failure. Two weeks ago, the presidents of the news divisions of NBC, CBS and ABC admitted for the first time that their coverage of the run up to the war was not critical enough. "Simply stated," says ABC News President David Westin now, "we failed the American people."

But the networks did more than that. They helped sell the war in the guise of reporting it. That's why Danny Schechter's WMD is so important -- it raises the issues that the mainstream media avoids. A former CNN and ABC producer, Danny couples an insider's experience with an outsider's analysis to chip away layer by layer at the media's fa?ade of service to the American public.

We need your help in spreading the word about WMD. We want it seen everywhere. The Cinema Libre studio that distributed OutFoxed has begun to get WMD into theaters but we want it shown in your community too.

WMD opens December 3 in Austin (Landmark Dobie Theater), Cambridge (Landmark Kendall Square) and Denver (Starz Theater). On December 10, it opens in San Francisco (Landmark Embarcadero), Berkeley (Oak Theater), St. Louis (Tivoli Theater) and Washington, DC (Landmark E-Street Cinema).

You can help us promote these screenings and set up other ones by visiting the WMD website (www.wmdthefilm.com) and downloading our outreach tools, flyers, flash animations and press releases (http://tinyurl.com/5p7o7).

You can also volunteer your time. Contact WMD Outreach Coordinator David DeGraw at David@wmdthefilm.com. David aims to present WMD in more than 100 theaters nationwide but he needs your help.

TV WATCH

On Tuesday, Dec. 7 (Pearl Harbor Day) the Sundance Channel and Court TV will air 4 films dedicated to the 1st Amendment. What better way to honor those who died on that day and those that followed after WWII was declared. They fought and died for our freedom; we can't let shrub & his cronies destroy it!

The first segment is "Fox Versus Franken." The next three weeks feature films by award-winning directors.

9PM Sundance Channel
10 PM Court TV

*******These cable outlets should be commended for this project**********

Sen. Chris Dodd (D, CT) has introduced legislation that would ban the feds from jailing journalist who refuse to divulge their sources. Many states have laws protecting journalists from this abuse, even some "red" ones! But, under shrub, dissent, free-thinking, and the Constitution are in comtempt of their "values." Here's a letter I wrote to Dodd, I encourage all others who values their rights to the same:

Dear Senator Dodd:

I want to applaud your efforts to introduce legislation that would prohibit the federal government from putting behind bars journalists who refuse to divulge their sources. As noted in the recent case of a jailed journalist in Rhode Island, the Bush Administration continues its pathetic disregard for civil liberties and its contempt for the Constitution. I am glad that a senator from my state has the courage to stand up for freedom. Americans need more courageous senators such as yourself in the Senate to safeguard our civil liberties!

Sincerely,


Sen Dodd can be reached at:
http://dodd.senate.gov/webmail/index.html

WHY NETWORK NEWS IS IRRELEVANT

December 5, 2004
FRANK RICH
The Nascar Nightly News: Anchorman Get Your Gun

IF Democrats want to run around like fools trying to persuade voters in red America that they are kissing cousins to Billy Graham, Minnie Pearl and Li'l Abner, that's their problem. Pandering, after all, is what politicians do, especially politicians as desperate as the Democrats. But when TV news organizations start repositioning themselves to pander to Nascar dads and "moral values" voters, it's a problem for everyone.

There's a war on. TV remains by far the most prevalent source of news for Americans. We need honest information to help us navigate, not bunkum skewed to flatter one segment of the country, whatever that segment might be. Yet here's how Jeff Zucker, the NBC president, summed up the attributes of Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw's successor, to Peter Johnson of USA Today: "No one understands this Nascar nation more than Brian." Mr. Zucker was in sync with his boss, Bob Wright, the NBC Universal chairman, who described America as a "red state world" on the eve of Mr. Brokaw's retirement. Though it may come as news to those running NBC, we actually live in a red-and-blue-state country, in a world that increasingly hates all our states without regard to our provincial obsession with their hues. Nonetheless, Mr. Williams, who officially took over as anchor on Dec. 2, is seeking a very specific mandate. "The New York-Washington axis can be a journalist's worst enemy," he told Mr. Johnson, promising to spend his nights in the field in "Dayton and Toledo and Cincinnati and Denver and the middle of Kansas." (So much for San Francisco - or Baghdad.)

I don't mean to single out Mr. Williams, who is prone to making such statements while wearing suits that reek of "New York-Washington axis" money and affectation. But when he talks in a promotional interview of how he found the pulse of the nation in Cabela's, a popular hunting-and-fishing outfitter in Dundee, Mich., and boasts of owning both an air rifle and part interest in a dirt-track stock-car team, he is declaring himself the poster boy for a larger shift in our news culture. He is eager to hunt down an audience, not a story.

He's not an isolated case. You know red is de rigueur when ABC undertakes the lunatic task of trying to repackage the last surviving evening news anchor, the heretofore aggressively urbane Peter Jennings, as a sentimental populist. In a new spot for "World News Tonight," Mr. Jennings tells us that "this is a really hopeful nation, and I think there's a great beauty in that." This homily is not only factually inaccurate - most Americans continue to tell pollsters that the nation is on the wrong track - but is also accompanied by a tinkling music-box piano and a montage leaning on such Kodak tableaus as a fishing cove, a small-town front porch and a weather-beaten man driving a car with a flag decal. Mr. Jennings is a smart newsman, but his just-folks incarnation is about as persuasive as Teresa Heinz Kerry's chow-down photo op at Wendy's.

If the Nascarization of news were only about merchandising, it would be a source of laughter more than concern. But the insidious leak of the branding into the product itself has already begun. Last Sunday morning both NBC's "Meet the Press" and ABC's "This Week" had roundtable discussions about - what else? - the "moral values" fallout of the election. Each show assembled a bevy of religious and quasi-religious leaders and each included a liberal or two. But though much of the "values" debate centered on abortion and gay marriage, neither panel contained a woman, let alone an openly gay cleric. Allowing such ostentatiously blue interlopers into the "values" club might frighten the horses - or at least the hunting dogs.

A creepier example of the shift toward red news could also be found last weekend when ABC's prime-time magazine show "20/20" aired an hourlong "investigation" into the brutal 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard in the red state of Wyoming. "20/20" added little except hyperventilation to previous revisionist accounts of the story, most notably JoAnn Wypijewski's 1999 Harper's article filling in the role crystal meth might have played in driving the crime. But ABC had obtained the first TV interviews with the killers and seemed determined to rehabilitate their images along the way. The reporter, Elizabeth Vargas, told us that while the pair had been "variously portrayed in press reports as 'rednecks' and 'trailer trash,' " they were actually just all-American everymen with "steady jobs, steady girlfriends and classically troubled backgrounds." Aaron McKinney, the killer who beat Shepard into an unrecognizable pulp, wasn't even challenged on camera when he said he had "gay friends" (none of whom were produced or persuavely vouched for by ABC) and that he had only invoked a homophobic "gay panic" defense in his trial because that's what the lawyers told him to do. What's not to like about the guy?

As chance would have it, this episode of "20/20" ran opposite the special "Dateline NBC" farewell to Mr. Brokaw. There could hardly be a more dramatic illustration of the changing of the tone, as well as of the guard, in network news.

Though the retrospective paid tribute, as Mr. Brokaw often has, to his roots in deeply red South Dakota, the career highlights that unfurled were not tied to any agenda but the stories the anchor reported. The newsmakers who made freshly shot guest appearances in the program to augment Mr. Brokaw's own accounts included not just George H. W. Bush and Norman Schwarzkopf but also Betty Friedan (who talked of how women of the 1950's "were supposed to have orgasms waxing the kitchen floor"), the AIDS activist Larry Kramer (whom Mr. Brokaw identified as his friend), Tom Hayden and, for the Watergate recap, a "former impeachment committee staffer" who happened to be Hillary Clinton. If Mr. Brokaw were arriving as anchor instead of leaving, this genuinely fair-and-balanced account of his career would have been vilified by the right-wing press and blogosphere 24/7 - assuming the red-state-besotted suits at NBC would have allowed him anywhere near the anchor chair in the first place.

That both Mr. Brokaw and Dan Rather are going into retirement in the aftermath of the election is a coincidence of timing but widely seen as a fateful one. It's been a cue to roll out once more the funeral rites for network news. We know the litany. The evening newscasts' ratings have been sinking for years, their budgets slashed, their audience forever slipping into the pharmaceutical demographic. The investigation into Mr. Rather's apparent reliance on forged documents in a "60 Minutes" exposé of President Bush's National Guard record is an added embarrassment, perhaps rivaling Rupert Murdoch's publication of the "authenticated" Hitler diaries two decades ago. But the perennial demise of network news has been the slowest final curtain in the history of show business, and is likely to continue indefinitely. All three network newscasts, not to mention the morning-news franchises led by "Today," draw exponentially more viewers than even Fox News's top-rated hits and make tons of money. Though more and more Americans use the Web as a news source, even there they often turn to the sites run by TV news. In the real world of 2004, it's still a TV culture - just look at the flat-screen set breaking some relative's bank this Christmas.

And so network news still counts. The idea, largely but not exclusively fomented by the right, that TV news might somehow soon be supplanted by blogging as a mass medium may remain a populist fantasy until Americans are able to receive blogs by iPod. (At which point they become talk radio.) The dense text in the best blogs often requires as much of a reader's time and concentration as high-end print journalism, itself facing declining circulation. Since blogging doesn't generate big (if any) profits, there's no budget for its "citizen reporters" to reliably blanket catastrophic and far-flung breaking news. (There are no bloggers among the 36 journalists thus far killed in the Iraq war.) Bloggers can fact-check documents (as in the Rather case), opine, organize, talk back, leak early exit polls and publish multimedia outings of the seemingly endless supply of closeted gay Republican officials. But if bloggers are actually doing front-line reporting rather than commenting upon the news in a danger zone like Falluja, chances are that they are underwritten by a day job on the payroll of a major news organization.

Kevin Sites, the freelance TV cameraman who caught a marine shooting an apparently unarmed Iraqi prisoner in a mosque, is one such blogger. Mr. Sites is an embedded journalist currently in the employ of NBC News. To NBC's credit, it ran Mr. Sites's mid-November report, on a newscast in which Mr. Williams was then subbing for Mr. Brokaw, and handled it in exemplary fashion. Mr. Sites avoided any snap judgment pending the Marines' own investigation of the shooting, cautioning that a war zone is "rife with uncertainty and confusion." But loud voices in red America, especially on blogs, wanted him silenced anyway. On right-wing sites like freerepublic.com Mr. Sites was branded an "anti-war activist" (which he is not), a traitor and an "enemy combatant." Mr. Sites's own blog, touted by Mr. Williams on the air, was full of messages from the relatives of marines profusely thanking the cameraman for bringing them news of their sons in Iraq. That communal message board has since been shut down because of the death threats by other Americans against Mr. Sites.

The attempt to demonize and censor Mr. Sites simply for doing his job is not an anomaly. Last spring The New York Post smeared Associated Press television cameramen as having "a mutually beneficial relationship with the insurgents in Falluja" simply because their cameras captured the horrific images of the four American contract workers slaughtered there. Well before the National Guard fiasco at CBS, red-state news-hounds tried to discredit Mr. Rather's scoop on the photos of Abu Ghraib as overblown if not treasonous. This hysterical rage at the networks is a testament to their continued power - specifically the power of pictures in each of these cases.

Such examples notwithstanding, the networks were often cautious about challenging government propaganda even before the election. (Follow-ups to the original Abu Ghraib story quickly fell off TV's radar screen.) As far back as last spring Ted Koppel's roll-call of the American dead on "Nightline," in which the only images were beatific headshots, was condemned as a shocking breach of decorum by the mostly red-state ABC affiliates that refused to broadcast it. If full-scale Nascarization is what's coming next, there will soon be no pictures but those promising a mission accomplished, no news but good news. And that's good news only if you believe America has something to gain by fighting a war in the dark.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

from Michaelmoore.com:

Anti-war cartoon causes offense


(cartoon pictures soldiers coffins draped in the flag)

King5

TACOMA, Wash. - A military family is asking the Tacoma News Tribune to apologize for what they consider an offensive editorial cartoon.

The newspaper serves primarily Pierce County, which is home to Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base.

The cartoon appeared on the opinion page this weekend. It showed flag-drapped caskets and the lyric to that classic song of holiday longing, "I'll be Home for Christmas."

“My first reaction was I started crying and just got really mad," said Cathy Painter, mother of a son who has just wrapped up a year-long tour of duty in Iraq.

“That could be my reality this Christmas and I don't need them reminding me of that," she said.

Painter's son, Army specialist and medic Brian Nation was also seeing red. He's about to be deployed again to Iraq. Both mother and son felt it was insensitive of the paper to run the cartoon in an area full of military families.

“I know people that have lost their lives over there and I thought it was very distasteful,” Nation said. "The editor should write an apology letter not only to people over there, but also to people back here who have lost loved ones in the war in Iraq."

At the News Tribune, the editor of the editorial page, Dave Seago, said the drawing was placed in the paper's weekly round-up of cartoons from across the country because the artist, Gary Markstein, made an important point.

"When I first saw it I said: 'Wow, that's powerful,'" he said. “Most of America is going about its business shopping and preparing for Christmas as always, while we have men fighting and dying overseas.”

At the newspaper's offices, managers admitted they received several complaints by phone and e-mail but expected some backlash.

"It certainly wasn't our intent nor the cartoonist's intent to be disrespectful as well," Seago said. But he said he would probably run the cartoon again.

Painter and Nation said they won't buy another News Tribune unless the paper issues an apology.

"We all know that's a reality of war -- yes, it's an ugly reminder -- but we don't need that thrown in our faces," Painter said.

Cartoonist Markstein, who drew the syndicated cartoon, lives in Milwaukee. It’s unclear how many papers it has appeared in and whether it's sparked controversy elsewhere.

is this a case for the Commisar of Culture, Colin Powell, Jr?!

I just love Howard.