James Poniewozik

In this week's edition of Time (dated October 24), TV writer James Poniewozik championed class warfare in several new TV shows, like the CBS sitcom Two Broke Girls. "[A]fter the 2008 meltdown and the TARP bailouts, after Wall Street bonuses rebounded while mortgages stayed underwater, do Americans still hear class warfare as if it's a bad thing?" He suggested viewers are up for "at least some spirited class fisticuffs."

From there, Poniewozik, like other liberals, launched into an attack on CNN's Erin Burnett for touring the Occupy Wall Street protests with a sneer instead of the usual worshipful media template. (See ABC's Dan Harris championing the yoga area and the grandmother's cookies from Idaho.) TV was of course too slow to start promoting these leftists:

NBC president Robert Greenblatt was really committed to the new drama “The Playboy Club” just weeks ago. “What it has going for it is a recognizable brand that's automatically going to draw attention to it, good or bad," he said. "It's the right kind of thing for us to try." They tried it. Three episodes later, NBC made it the first canceled series of the season. Trains have rarely wrecked as ingloriously as this one.

By the third episode, NBC could barely muster 3 million viewers, while ABC (“Castle”) and CBS (“Hawaii Five-O”) were both over 11 million. This show had flop sweat all over it. Entertainment Weekly wrote after the cancellation announcement that “The move is no surprise and, indeed, was expected months before the show premiered.” So why on Earth did NBC work so hard to promote this show and its pornographic brand?

 

Openly lesbian NPR arts reporter Neda Ulaby was given the assignment of making light news out of the gay-activism petition to get the Muppet characters Ernie and Bert married on "Sesame Street" on Friday night's All Things Considered. Her only sources for comment were a lesbian comedian and a liberal Time magazine TV critic.

She did not interview the petition's author Lair Scott, who proclaimed: “I started this Change.org petition because I believe we need more media representation of gay and lesbian people in children’s programming,” said Scott. “There are currently no LGBT characters on Sesame Street, nor in any children’s television program.”

One of the biggest liberal-media promoters of the Jon Stewart-Stephen Colbert rally is Time TV writer James Poniewozik. His piece in the Time magazine leading up to the event was syrupy (starting with the heroic artwork).  The headline was “Can These Guys Be Serious? Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert want to restore reason to public life.” Time highlighted this sentence: "The rally is based on the essence of Stewart's and Colbert's comedy: the defense of rationality in an irrational age."

Poniewozik knows their shows are liberal. Time didn't highlight his admission that "Both hosts are liberal."  Even the left-leaning Pew Reseach Center found in study three months of Stewart shows in 2007 that Stewart's humor targeted Republicans more than three times as often as Democrats.  

But Poniewozik has the been the main cheerleader of the viewpoint that Jon and Steve can be comedians and leftists at the same time, satirical figures and protest leaders. In fact, as many liberals have proclaimed, Poniewozik thinks this takes them to a whole new plateau of relevance: "In other words, two comedians are taking it upon themselves to say America is making itself look ridiculous. They're taking a risk in doing it. Idealism can be the death of funny, which is why, as Stewart himself has put it, comedians 'don't lead a lot of marches.' But the very attempt demonstrates that the cable comedy hosts have become the most relevant voices in late-night TV."

With the recently announced end of Fox's hit series "24," many liberal pundits are parading the show as a false depiction of the notion that "torture works." Contrary to their accusations, the Jack Bauer interrogation methods bear exactly zero resemblance to any actual interrogation techniques used by American military, law enforcement, or intelligence agents.

"On '24,' torture saves lives," the New York Times's Brian Stelter writes, disapprovingly. James Poniewozik, writing on a Time Magazine blog, attributes the show's supposed approval of harsh interrogations to the "conservative politics of co-creator Joel Surnow."

Any American who has serious doubts that our military and intelligence officials would allow interrogators to, say, directly threaten the lives of a terrorist's family (let alone inflict tremendous physical pain) to elicit information has a better grasp of interrogation techniques -- and the integrity of our men and women in uniform -- than most of the liberal media.

Time TV writer James Poniewozik wrote on his blog Tuned In on Wednesday that he was impressed that Brit Hume wasn’t backing down on his Tiger Woods remarks, but he really wasn’t accepting Hume’s claim that talking about Jesus is much more controversial than talking about Buddha:

If you believe your religion is superior and want to stand by the argument, fine. But crying anti-Christian persecution when you're criticized for making that case on a news show? Get off the cross.

Did Hume literally suggest he was being crucified? No. Poniewozik was responding to an interview Hume granted to D.C. all-news radio station WTOP, in which he suggested "Jesus Christ" could be the two most controversial words in the English language (at the very end of the interview).

The latest Pew poll found people see Fox News as conservative, but Time media writer James Poniewozik noted large numbers also thought the major networks were liberal. That must mean it’s time to assert the media has a "moderate bias." This is defined, as liberals usual define it, as pretending conservative idiocy isn’t idiocy:

As anyone following health reform knows, centrism is a political position too. And you see moderate bias — i.e., a preference for centrism — whenever a news outlet assumes that the truth must be "somewhere in the middle." You see it whenever an organization decides that "balance" requires equal weight for an opposing position, however specious: "Some, however, believe global warming is a myth." (Moderate bias would also require me to find a countervailing liberal position and pretend that it is equivalent to global-warming denial. Sorry.)

Time TV writer and blogger James Poniewozik raised eyebrows when he reported that although he voted for Barack Obama, MSNBC's gleeful Obama coverage makes him sympathetic to Americans whose legs are not so thrilled. He disdained their "blatantly triumphalist" promos as worse than Fox News, and suggested MSNBC is wildly inconsistent for first suggesting that Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann aren’t objective enough to anchor major political events like the conventions, but then decide they’re just fine for anchoring their hero Obama's inauguration:

...MSNBC has decided it's OK to relax and let its pro-Bama freak flag fly. As if to confirm every "real vs. fake America" stereotype Sarah Palin and company perpetrated during the campaign, MSNBC's inauguration coverage will even run in Starbucks in New York, San Francisco and Seattle. (Seriously: did David Brooks think up that promotion?) On one of its incessantly running Inauguration Day promos, a narrator gushes, "When a new President inspires the nation, one day Americans will ask: where were you when Barack Obama became President?"

Besides the confusing timeline of that sentence, there's something almost bludgeoningly hortatory about it. Mind you, I voted for Barack Obama enthusiastically, in the primaries and the general election--and yet hearing stuff like this (Obama = The Moon Landing) I can empathize with the people who didn't.

In this week’s Time magazine, TV writer James Poniewozik laments the McCain’s campaign against Barack Obama’s celebrity in an eye-popping way: he says it’s "almost unpatriotic," and that in denigrating America’s celebrity culture, McCain’s like "al-Qaeda and the French." Here’s the graf:

Why, after all, is celebrity an insult? Personal magnetism, the ability to galvanize attention and rally masses: this is a bad quality in a Chief Executive? J.F.K. and Ronald Reagan managed to soldier on with this handicap. Besides, celebrity is America's chief international export. There's something almost unpatriotic about denigrating it; it's like insulting Obama by comparing him to a GMC truck. (You know who complains about American celebrity culture? Al-Qaeda and the French, that's who!)

This is one of those media moments to remember when the suggest that political commercials are far too negative. Which is more negative? McCain throwing in pictures of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton for a jokey two seconds, or Time suggesting McCain’s like al-Qaeda?

The first national breast-beating about Katie Couric leaving the anchor desk and potentially un-diversifying the anchor corps has come from Time TV writer James Poniewozik, who demands that the networks enshrine diversity. "Am I calling on the networks to act in the name of mere cosmetic appearance? Yes! News anchors are -- more than any profession outside of car-show modeling -- about cosmetic appearance." (Unlike Time, apparently, who picked top editor Richard Stengel in 2006, a disappointing "white dude.") Poniewozik lamented that just as the diversity in the Democratic campaign looks like 2060, the networks are headed back to 1960:

If one side of the debate stage is Star Trek, however, the question-asking side looks like Dragnet. In the Democratic debates, Obama and Hillary Clinton have taken questions from Charles Gibson, Brian Williams, Tim Russert, Wolf Blitzer--white guy, white guy, white guy, white guy.