aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Fox News admits bias
No fair-minded person actually believes that Fox News is unbiased, so pretending that it is calls for steely corporate resolve. On occasion, this vigilance pays off. Last year, for example, the Wall Street Journal actually ran a correction after its news pages described Fox News, accurately, as “a network sympathetic to the Bush cause and popular with Republicans.” Getting one of this country’s most prestigious newspapers to state that up is down and black is white is no small public-relations victory, and if we can’t admire Fox News’ candor, we can at least marvel at its ability to remain on message. Or rather, we could admire it, before [Fox News’ London bureau chief] Scott Norvell went and shot his big mouth off.
Here’s the quote:
Even we at Fox News manage to get some lefties on the air occasionally, and often let them finish their sentences before we club them to death and feed the scraps to Karl Rove and Bill O’Reilly.
It was published in the Wall Street Journal’s European edition on May 20. That was 5 days before the Fox Freudian slip in which Fox News anchor David Asman asked Sen. Trent Lott’s (R-MS) “if we should have done it and if we had the votes to do it” why comprimise?
These guys are drunk with success, so much so that they get careless and the truth comes out.
Buy a Jag…
...or a Land Rover and Ford will donate $1,000 to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
That’s just one of the reasons the American Family Association is boycotting Ford. The Volvo ad pictured here is another (click to enlarge
“From redefining family to include homosexual marriage, to giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to support homosexual groups and their agenda, to forcing managers to attend diversity training on how to promote the acceptance of homosexuality… Ford leads the way,” American Family Association chairman Donald Wildmon said in a statement…
Tupelo, Miss.-based AFA said it e-mailed an announcement about the Ford boycott to 2.2 million supporters. AFA special projects director Randy Sharp said nearly 55,000 people had signed a pledge supporting the boycott by Tuesday afternoon.
I can only hope it’s as successful as their 9 year Disney boycott ended last week:
The AFA launched its boycott nine years ago, insisting that Disney ban “Gay Day” events at the company’s theme parks, stop providing benefits to domestic partners of gay employees, and create an advisory panel of evangelical Christians to make sure Disney was making the religious right happy.
In response, Disney ignored the AFA and Michael Eisner refused to even speak to the group’s representatives. None of the group’s demands have been met.
Gay Days at Disney has its 15th Anniversary event this weekend (we went last year and my 1999 photos are somehow on their website), and Orlando was recently written up in the Times as a gay destination. With that kind of success, maybe there’s a Ford in your future.
Check it out Brew
David Pescovitz at Boing Boing points to the tale of the Billboard Liberation Front attack on a billboard in San Francisco across from Golden Gate Park near Haight Street:
This billboard modification was above and beyond what is typical for the BLF and included an animatronic Ronald McDonald force feeding a hamburger to an obese child, with a backdrop covering the billboard which consisted of well-fed Ronald McDonald and alien figures.
Related: I finally saw Super Size Me this past weekend. Brilliant! Loved it. If you haven’t seen it, rent it.
Contagious media
From Jonah Peretti at Eyebeam, on the Contagious Media Project:
Global capitalism has produced hundreds of millions of bored office workers who sit in front of computers forwarding emails and surfing the web, inadvertently creating the Bored at Work Network (BWN). The BWN has become the largest alternative to the corporate media. Activists, artists, and hackers can reach millions of people through the BWN.
Solo and in collaborative groups, I create content for the BWN, including email forwards, net art, joke web sites, phone lines, and weblogs. These viral projects are examples of what I call “Contagious Media” and this site documents four examples that have reached millions of people: the Nike email, the Rejection Line, Black People Love Us, and Fundrace.org.
These experiments illustrate the practical application of concepts like emergence, 6-degrees of separation, and tipping points. The work starts small and spreads virally to millions of people without any promotions, advertisements, or press releases. In the end, the mass media picks up the story as a trend, and the work is able to permeate the culture at multiple levels.
This low-budget, bottom-up approach makes it possible to create a global cascade that begins with a small group of friends and extends to the set of CNN or the Today Show. These Contagious Media Experiments suggest new opportunities for artists and activists in the networked age.
