And that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown
The Charlie Brown Christmas Special owns a special place in my heart. It's contained within the 1960's Peanuts DVD collection that has an honored place on my entertainment shelf at home, the program captivated an audience of gentle souls at Moeller Television Festival V, and Vince Guaraldi's jazz score kicks some proverbial ass.Yesterday, superblogger Ken Levine published the little known story of the advertising executive that fought for this unusual TV special 44 years ago this month, helping to launch it to its cultural greatness. The annual airing of the special was pre-empted tonight due to the President's speech, but it will air later this month on the Walt Disney network.
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In blogs past, I've referred to NBC television as the General Electric network, just as I just referred to the ABC network as Walt Disney (see above). We should always be acutely aware of who's writing the checks for our national news gatherers. There's a grand illusion in this country that we have media diversity. Indeed, there are hundreds of channels on the television (not on mine, but on those with better cable packages), and still just six corporations(!) control roughly 80 percent of all media in the country.
I was just out of the shower this morning when that wanker Matt Lauer on the "Today" show introduced to the nation the couple that crashed the White House state dinner last week. "I feel the need to say this and ask this--" Lauer said, "Are you appearing here today in any way because of a financial deal that you have made with this network? Are we paying you for this appearance in any way?" No, came the resounding reply from both Mr. and Mrs. America.
Did the couple have a financial deal with "NBC"? No, they didn't, but it turns out they did have one with Bravo, a network owned and operated by-- wait for it-- NBC Universal and General Electric.
Now I grant you that Matt Lauer is a newsman the way Shaquille O'Neal is a police officer, but for grief's sake, he is pretending to be one in the middle of national television. When I was going into the bathroom 20 minutes earlier, he was interviewing Karl Rove. So thank the stars in heaven that we live in an era of internet muckrakers to call shenanigans on such slippery corporate behavior. Busted!
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I want to be fair with the President in regards to his Afghanistan speech tonight. I think it's great that he delivered it without the flight suit.
posted by CM @ 8:30 PM
2 Comments:
If you liked the networks when they were owned by a few corporations, you’ll love them when they are owned by the government. TA
They already own PBS which has the only news on TV I have a reasonable amount of respect for.
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