Brent Bozell's blog

Today's installment of the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization comes from Hollywood – as if that’s a surprise. Tinseltown is demeaning Christianity again – as if that’s a surprise, too. But this time, it’s not some gutter-mouthed punk. This time it’s a network doing it, formally. ABC has approved a pilot with the title “Good Christian Bitches.”

Is this what Christian women – especially the good ones -- deserve? The first credit for this decision to offer offensive titles actually goes to CBS, which began this stupid trend with its awful sitcom “$#8! My Dad Says.” Now one of Discovery's cable channels has a show titled “Who the [Bleep] Did I Marry?” It chronicles women who have married vicious criminals.

But Disney-owned ABC (oh, the irony) has not one, but two B-word pilots in its outhouse of a production department. They're also considering a show titled “Don't Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23.”

Mickey Mouse should have his hands over his ears.

Managing Editor's Note:  NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center president Brent Bozell sent a letter to the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate committees with oversight of NPR stating that PBS does not deserve a dime of taxpayer funding and that a government that is broke should not be in the business of funding a left-wing playground.

A portion of the letter sent by Mr. Bozell to Congress follows:

On March 2, two U.S airmen, Nicholas Alden and Zachary Cuddeback, were gunned down at the airport in Frankfurt, Germany. Two other Americans were wounded. The assailant was a radical Muslim. This was a huge story to most Americans – but, naturally, but not to our news media. If the amount of air time is any measure, the assassination of our troops drew a yawn.

That night, ABC’s “World News” offered a full report, but CBS and NBC each gave it less than 30 seconds. "Troops under attack in Germany, targeted by a gunman shouting in Arabic about jihad," reported ABC anchor Diane Sawyer. Neither CBS or NBC found room for “jihad” talk, and never found time to ask about the young American lives extinguished.

CBS saved room that night for Mickey Rooney’s testimony about “elder abuse.” NBC needed to save four minutes and 15 seconds for semi-retired Tom Brokaw’s report on the decline in Reading, Pennsylvania, and then devoted another two and half minutes to promoting the Smithsonian’s attempt to find a “Candid Camera in the Wilderness” with animal spycams.

When President Obama’s budget came out in February, with the greatest expansion of federal spending in American history, some sycophantic media outlets like The Washington Post ridiculously tried to sell the concept that Obama was pushing “deep cuts.” It was a publicity line that collapsed on itself within 24 hours.

The Democrats are doing nothing to rein in the spending that is leading America into bankruptcy. What the Republican leadership is proposing, with its minuscule cuts, is a small fraction of a huge deficit.

Freshman Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is about the only one proposing significant cuts, and for that he will be massacred, if the media have their way. On the February 23 broadcast of ABC’s “Nightline,” they actually cartooned him as a crazed maniac with a chain saw. It was presented as “news,” but it had all the markings of a negative ad cooked up in the video lab at the DNC.

The battle in Madison, Wisconsin between new Gov. Scott Walker and the public-sector union hacks offers an amazing study in journalistic double standards. The same national media that have spent the last two years drawing devil’s horns and Klan hoods on the Tea Party protesters have switched sides with lightning speed. In the Wisconsin protesters, they find sweetness and light, “hope and change.”

From her Sunday soapbox, ABC host Christiane Amanpour snobbishly deplored the Tea Party as not conservative, but “extreme” last fall. In a special “town hall” episode of her show on the Ground Zero mosque debate, she accused an incredulous Gary Bauer of encouraging vandalism at a Tennessee mosque because somehow, Christian rhetoric is offensive. The accusation itself was offensive because it was entirely baseless.

Yet in Wisconsin, the exact opposite happened. Amanpour took the extreme, vicious, and wholly offensive signs comparing Gov. Walker to Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak – and embraced them as geopolitically accurate: “People power, making history: A revolt in the Midwest, and a revolution sweeping across the Middle East.” She touted how “populist frustration is boiling over this week.”

The 911 call went out on January 27. Charlie Sheen was unconscious after another wild 36-hour bout with alcohol and drugs. People magazine reported paramedics found him unresponsive, drooling blood. He looked like death. He was rushed to the hospital, and there the family gathered, expecting the worst. Again, he survived.

Nobody seems able to stop this train. No one can force him to change. And CBS will stop at nothing in its willingness to dote on its superstar, offering no “judgmental” analysis of his behavior. In this business, profitability comes before respectability. Sheen, star of the filthy sitcom "Two and a Half Men," is the highest-paid actor in television (at $1.2 million an episode), and he can apparently do and say anything and be welcomed back to work. It’s why Entertainment Weekly calls Sheen “TV’s Most Valuable Disaster.”

Jaws dropped across the nation’s capital at the audacious annihilation of the truth on the front page of the February 15 Washington Post. The top headline read “Obama budget makes deep cuts, cautious trades.” It’s another day at the Post, where every day is an April Fool’s joke.

Reporter Lori Montgomery didn’t exactly say “deep cuts” in her first sentence. She explained that Obama’s budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2012 made “surgical cuts and cautious trade-offs.” But two paragraphs later, the reporter admitted “the president’s offer to freeze funding for domestic programs would produce minimal savings in the short term.” That doesn’t match the  “deep cuts” headline in large, bold type  – because there are none.

The top of the pop charts has become a low, low, place indeed. Just last summer, the singer Cee-Lo took popular culture one rung lower into the sewer with the release of his song titled “F--- You.” After a few weeks, it was mainstreamed into “Forget You,” but why bother? While both versions sold well, the vulgar one clearly had its intended effect.

The pop star Pink now has her own version with her new single titled “F---in' Perfect.” How creative. That’s reaching for the stars.

Once again, there are two versions, with the words “less than” replacing the profanity. Again, why bother pretending to be concerned about standards? The original song contains seven F-bombs. She asks “don't you ever ever feel / Like you're less than f---in' perfect,” and then insists “you're f---in' perfect to me!”

Editor's Note: Following news reports today that AOL News would pay $315 million to acquire The Huffington Post, NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center president Brent Bozell issued the following statement:

This proves AOL News has lost its mind. They must be in such dire straits that they’ve been blinded by the millions and think an acquisition of The Huffington Post is worth sacrificing credibility and objectivity. AOL News is fooling only itself in thinking there is no journalistic conflict in merging with a hate-filled, vicious, radically left-wing rag.

Editor's Note: In the last 24 hours, State Senator Leland Yee (D-CA) has incriminated Rush Limbaugh for a racist fax sent to him by an unidentified individual which allegedly read, "Rush Limbaugh will kick your Ch--k ass and expose you for the fool you are.”

NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center (MRC) President Brent Bozell issued the following statement regarding the media reaction to this charge:

Editor's Note: The following is a brief statement released by NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center (MRC) president Brent Bozell earlier today regarding MSNBC firing Keith Olbermann.

It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Olbermann was a failure because he was vicious, insulting and off-the-charts liberal. And they replaced him with Lawrence O'Donnell, who is Olbermann but without talent. It is absolutely guaranteed that MSNBC will sink even lower. This network is clueless.

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The cultural Left would like you to think that children should be free to experiment persistently in the Laboratory of Life without soul-stifling rules. They have limits to libertine behavior, to be sure. No high school bake sales (encourages obesity), no bottled water (destroys the environment), and absolutely no uncivil bullying of people who are different than you (unless they belong to the Tea Party, in which case you can blame them for random shootings.)

Now those secular progressives at MTV have opened a new front. They feel one should enjoy a childhood stuffed with sex, drugs, and alcoholism. That would be the message of their new teen drama “Skins.” Adapted from a British series and filmed in Canada, MTV boasts that the actors are actually under 18 – in another intepretation, we call them “children” – and that the show's writers are barely out of high school, so its libertine escapades are authentic, “the real secret lives” of teenagers.

MTV promotes itself as “the world’s premier youth entertainment brand” and “the cultural home of the millennial generation.” It’s so proud of this show's sleaze that they're even rating it TV-MA (for mature audiences only). It's not a warning. It's an invitation.

Editor's Note: In the wake of the CNSNews.com interview with potential presidential hopeful Rick Santorum and his criticism of President Obama’s support for abortion rights, numerous major news outlets including Politico, National Journal, the Wall Street Journal, and the Daily Beast have accused Santorum of playing the “race card” while discussing human life and personhood protected by the Constitution.

Santorum said this: "The question is, and this is what Barack Obama didn’t want to answer: Is that human life a person under the Constitution? And Barack Obama says no. Well, if that human life is not a person, then I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say ‘now we are going to decide who are people and who are not people.’”

What follows is NewsBusters publisher/Media Research Center founder Brent Bozell's reaction to the media attacks on the former Pennsylvania senator.

This has nothing to do with a supposed "race card." This isn’t even just about Rick Santorum. The media whirlwind whipped up on these accusations are nothing more than the continuation of an ugly and dishonest attempt to distort, delegitimize and damn conservative principles and conservative leaders.

Anyone who actually watched this interview can see that Santorum paralleled what many pro-life leaders have compared in the past. Just ask Dr. Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Day Gardner, Rev. Childress or any number of other black leaders who have also called abortion the civil rights issue of our day.

Editor's Note: NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center founder Brent Bozell issued the following statement and provided evidence on the double standard of blaming conservatives for the tragic shooting in Tucson, Arizona while repeatedly ignoring left-wing media outbursts wishing death upon conservatives:

The so-called ‘news’ media have zero currency in this debate because we have documented the Left using hateful, vicious language far worse than any conservative. Their attacks on conservatives are untrue and utterly hypocritical. If they really cared about the effects of political rhetoric, they would have gone after any number of those left-wingers who have directly incited violence – starting with the man with the world’s biggest audience: President Obama. After all, he did say, "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun."

But that would be a ridiculous charge. And besides, the media aren’t really concerned about violent rhetoric. This is part of a much more insidious and calculated campaign to criminalize conservative thought.

Next they will ramp up support to regulate free speech on radio airwaves and the like. They want to illegalize opposition to liberal thought and are willing to accuse, indict and prosecute anyone who stands in the way of that Socialist goal.

Here are some lowlights of the left-wing media’s death wishes:

Managing Editor's Note: Media Research Center President Brent Bozell issued the following statement after a thorough, two-day review of how the media have covered the tragic shooting in Arizona.

Implicating a conservative tie to this heinous act of violence or to Jared Lee Loughner, who is no conservative, is nothing short of a naked campaign to criminalize conservative thought.

Sadly, those who point their finger are at the nexus of hypocrisy. Take the unidentified “veteran Democratic strategist” who told Politico that, ‘they need to deftly pin this on the tea partiers … Just like the Clinton White House deftly pinned the Oklahoma City bombing on the militia and anti-government people.’

The Super Bowl is more than just a huge day for professional football fans. Part of the game’s massive audience is there for the chance to see how mega-corporations creatively spend millions of dollars for one Super Bowl commercial.  Some Super Bowl ads are brilliant and successful. Budweiser knows it has hit one out of the park when its ad is Monday’s water-cooler talk.

But never understimate the ability of some people to go too far, where talent and imagination are rejected for sophistry and shock. Take the ad geniuses for Doritos and PepsiMax, who posted on YouTube some entrants in their “Crash the Super Bowl” ad contest. One entry, titled “Feed the Flock,” [video] crassly, deliberately mocked Christianity and the Holy Eucharist. Instead of offering the Body of Christ, some priests are shown lining up the faithful to receive Doritos and PepsiMax diet cola. Their church was sinking in popularity –  until Jesus was replaced by a snack chip.

There is nothing the Left believes in more robotically than the stupidity of conservatives. Otherwise, they would not be conservatives. When liberals get routed in an election, they do not question themselves. The first, and for most, only verdict is that the American people were disastrously flooded by a tsunami of stupidity and misinformation.

So it’s not surprising that left-wing bloggers would rejoice when they can write the headline “New Study Proves That Fox News Makes You Stupid.” That’s the Daily Kos headline. According to them, Fox News is “deliberately misinforming their viewers” to help Republicans, who “benefited from the ignorance Fox News helped to proliferate,” as voters “based their decisions on demonstrably false information.”