Day: 2/13/2007

Joan Baez’ Publicist Shows How It’s Done

Posted by on February 13, 2007 at 11:52 pm. NO Comments :

Mike Straka, VP and Executive Producer of FOXNews.com, got dissed in a most deserving way. The author of “Grrr! Celebrities Are Ruining Our Country”, was attempting to corral a celebrity at the Grammys so he could mooch a little bit off of her fame. After which he likely would have included her in his next celeb bashing book. As he tells the story of his brief encounter with Joan Baez…

“she was on her way over to talk to Anita Vogel and me when her publicist whisked her away shouting, “They’re FOX. We don’t talk to FOX.”

Are you listening celebrities, publicists and, for that matter, politicians? It’s just that easy. My compliments to the astute publicist who steered her client away from the “flabbergasted” Strata. Although why he would be surprised is confusing. As the author of a book that accuses celebrities of ruining the country, and a honcho at a network that features Laura Ingraham and her “Shut up and Sing” mentality, Strata ought to have been embarrassed to show up on the red carpet at all. He could learn something himself from the introduction Baez gave to the Dixie Chicks that evening:

“I’ve spent much of my life being told to shut up and sing. Yet every once in a while, artists stand up and use the power of music to show us the great American folksinger Woody Guthrie had the right dream: This land is your land. This land is my land…“

Artists, musicians, celebrities, and other creative people in public life are not the ones who are ruining this country, Mr. Strata. It’s the media whores who are so obsessed with tabloid melodrama that they fail to cover truly important issues who are causing the real damage.

War On The Press?

Posted by on February 13, 2007 at 10:38 pm. NO Comments :

Slate’s editor at large, Jack Shafer, disputes the notion that the Bush administration is at war with the media. His support for that position is that the New York Times’ James Risen and Eric Lichtblau aren’t imprisoned at Gitmo. He further imagines that…

“A president intent on making war on the press would surely have carpet-bombed Dana Priest and the Washington Post for her secret prisons journalism. By now, Seymour M. Hersh of The New Yorker would have been executed on general principle.”

The entire thrust of his opinion rests on whether or not you take the word “war” literally. Since no one I can think of would ever do that in this context, it seems silly to base his whole argument on it. What kind of idiocy would it require to assert that a war on the press meant sending in the Marines? Shafer knows what war on the press means and he gives a pretty good description of it later in the article:

“…it’s true that the Bush administration hates the press and shouts it out frequently, that it tells lies, that it makes the lives of reporters as miserable as it can, that it plays propaganda games at every step, overclassifies, manufactures “phony news,” and intimidates the press…”

If that’s not a war on the press, I don’t know what is. Shafer ought to admit that the tactics he ascribes to the Bush administration constitute actual hostility to a free press and pose a clear and present danger to honest and independent journalism.