Posts Tagged ‘cbs’
So as the latest issue of the National Enquirer comes out with the headline that Macaulay Culkin is a Heroin addict with a $6,000 a month habit, a couple thoughts jump out on seeing the headline and the photo.
First, it is the National Enquirer, so you have to take the headline with the grain of salt coming from a tabloid that regularly used to publish stories about Elvis sightings and alien abductions.
That being said, when you consider the number of legit stories the Enquirer has broken over the last couple decades (scooping the old media on many of the unsavory details of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, breaking the story of John Edward’s love child when the rest of the media was still gushing over the golden boy as a legitimate candidate for president, publishing photos of O.J. Simpson in Bruno Magli shoes after he’d testified in his murder trial that he’d never owned a pair of Bruno Magli shoes – to name just a few) and when you consider the fact that the rest of the media has descended from jornalism into becoming news fabricating propaganda machines, with many more bogus stories and scandals on their own houses than the Enquirer of late (the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Jayson Blair fired for inventing dozens of stories out of thin air, Dan Rather and CBS caught trying to influence an election with memogate, where a proportionally-spaced Microsoft Word document was passed off for weeks on their “news” programs as a typewritten memo from the 1970s, Newsweek with the blood on their hands of over 30 people who died in the riots that ensued over their publishing of a bogus story on U.S. soldiers desecrating the Quran and more recently, a string of totally unfounded accusations of the Tea Party being to blame in the failed Times Square bombing, the Giffords shooting and the Aurora movie massacre – all of which were proven false) looking at their recent histories, I’d say the National Enquirer has risen and the rest of the media has sunk to a level where they’re now pretty much on par with each other.
So I would no longer dismiss this story outright simply because it’s from the Enquirer. Going by the photo, my first guess was either this guy’s on drugs or if not, he may need to find his way into a treatment center for an eating disorder.
My second thought – you can’t even call the headline “shocking” considering how many child stars emerge from childhood into lives filled with drugs, booze, chaotic relationships and trouble with the law. For every child star like Ron Howard or Shirley Temple who managed to avoid the pitfalls and scandals and go on to do even greater things with their lives as adults, for every one of those stories there seem to be a dozen Todd Bridges, Gary Colemans and Dana Platos (three child star train wrecks from one TV sitcom alone.) Drew Barrymore didn’t even make it out of childhood before her life began spiraling out of control, with sleaze balls helping the young star of the blockbuster movie E.T. into nightclubs at the age of ten, giving the young girl booze and drugs and Lord knows what else.
I don’t think any of us can cast judgment on any of these kids turned train wrecks as adults. Is there even one in one-hundred thousand of us who have lived a life with even a glimmer of what it must be like to have that much money and adulation at so young an age? When the adorableness of childhood has left them and, as often is the case, Hollywood has tossed them out like yesterday’s news, one can only imagine how destructive the cocktail must be when you combine that adulation lost with having having more money than most young people would know what to do with.
More often than not, it seems not so much a question of if the child star will avoid some level of devastation and disaster as they get older, but how long it may take for them to pull themselves out of it or if they ever will. In the case of Drew Barrymore, she pulled herself together, big time. Todd Bridges has gotten sober and last I saw he was in featured in a commercial as a counselor for a rehab facility. Lindsay Lohan, another former child star, is a case where we still have yet to see how that one’s going to come out, although I can tell you that I’m rooting for her.
As far as Macaulay goes, that heroin, if he’s on it, that is one wicked and soul-sucking drug. I have a friend who’s been a junkie now for the last six of his twenty-three years. I didn’t know him before he shot that junk up for the first time, but I can picture him before the drug took hold: guitar player, songwriter, a somewhat soft-spoken guy, I can picture him as a very sweet and sensitive kid before he got on the smack. The guy I know now is nothing like the seventeen-year-old I imagine back then.
You want to program a human being to become the most manipulative person imaginable? Imagine a person in the grip of a drug where every day, they have to wake up with their very first thought being, I’ve either got to get my hustle on and figure out a way to score or I am going to be painfully, wretchedly, violently ill.
Every day my friend seems to find a way to score and yet even as he feeds that monkey the two or three times a day that it requires, even with the temporary calm that comes once the monkey is fed, he still is restless and angry. That drug has made him into a person who goes through life looking for every reason imaginable to be angry at the world and all the people around him. There’s no reasoning with him or trying to explain that whatever wrongs he feels the world has dealt him, to have been given a life in the upper-middle-class of late 20th century America is a much better lot in life than ninety-nine percent of the people who have been born. Trying to give him that perspective is pointless. Heroin has forced him into a life where he spends his days compiling a list of grievances against the world, a never-ending list that he uses to justify his addiction.
If there’s one saving grace that comes with having struggled in my own life, it’s the humility it’s given me and the empathy I’ve developed for others who struggle themselves, and empathy is a far more powerful and benevolent emotion than sympathy, because sympathy often comes mixed with an inescapable degree of condescention.
Even after I had to tell my junkie friend to leave the house and don’t come back and he got off one lucky punch which broke my nose, forcing me to take him to the ground and put him into submission with a headlock, I empathized with him and after he left, I prayed for him and I still pray for him now.
If Macaulay Culkin is in a bad place and suffering with a heroin addiction of his own, may we all avoid the temptation to cast judgment and smirk at the news of another child star gone off the deep end. May we all find a place in our hearts to pray for him to overcome his addiction as well.
source: Kickin’ and Screamin’, hat tip: @tricityjdw
You would think Barack Obama would be happy to have every other news network outside of Fox News running a full-fledged propaganda machine for his administration, but no sir, when it comes to the way Obama sees things, one channel daring to question his administration is one channel too many.
The thin-skinned president’s first press secretary, Robert Gibbs, started the White House’s War on Fox by citing two OPINION SHOWS on Fox News as evidence of the news organization being “illegitimate,” with senior advisor David Axelrod going so far as to call on all the other media outlets in the Obama State Media to join the administration in declaring Fox News as “not a news organization.”
(Of course, while Obama, Gibbs and Axelrod are outraged by opinions expressed on Fox’s opinion shows, they seem to be just fine with opinions passed off as “news” on MSNBC.)
After two years of the White House’s War on Fox, the administration finally surrendered with Robert Gibbs raising the white flag.
(It never seemed to dawn on the administration that their petty little vendetta against a single news network was far beneath the dignity of the office. Perhaps it came down to Team Obama realizing that Fox News had just pulled ratings of literally ten times the viewers over CNN, with fully one-third of them being Democrats. If you can’t beat ‘em, at least try to play nice with them.)
It was only a matter of time, however, before the White House brought in a new press secretary and re-engaged in their War on Fox, resuming with the cheap shots and the snide remarks and culminating in Jay Carney (allegedly) making an angry and threatening phone call to Fox News’ executive vice president Michael Clemente for his network daring to air a piece the administration took exception to.
Can you imagine how low Obama’s poll numbers would have sunk by now if it wasn’t for his cheerleading squad of ABC-NBC-CBS-PBS-NPR-CNN-MSNBC working so hard to keep him afloat? If only it wasn’t for that damn, pesky Fox News . . .
My guess is that Barack Obama will only be happy when all dissent is outlawed.
Say what you want about Fox News, some people imagine they lean a little right, okay, I’ll admit they do, but whether you love Fox News or hate them, there’s one thing you must admit – if it weren’t for the Fox News Channel, we would be living in a country where the media was as completely one-sided and controlled by the ruling party as it is in countries like Cuba, Venezuela, Iran or Russia. Think of it, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and of course, PBS and MSNBC, every single one of them, straight propagandist cheerleaders for Barack Obama.
So last night, Mitt Romney won five out of five primaries and locked up enough delegates to become the inevitable Republican to face Obama in the presidential election. Over the entire course of the primary contest, for the Obama State Media, it was newsworthy and fun showing all the sound bites when the Republican candidates were duking it out amongst each other, but the fact that last night, Mitt Romney came out on top as the undisputed Republican nominee for president?
Think about this again – ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, PBS, MSNBC, when it was their beloved Obama crossing the threshold to claim the nomination for himself, they were trumpeting the news with joy, “Hark! The herald angels sing!” as they reported with glee how Barack Obama had become the Democrat nominee.
Yet here we are now, in this historic moment where for the first time in American history, a major political party nominates a Mormon to run for president? Silence. Crickets. (Mormon hating bigots!)
After what was a pretty long and drawn out primary, last night, Mitt Romney was finally able to heave himself a celebratory sigh of relief as he wrapped the nomination up and nailed Obama in a speech with some really good lines. The amount of face time the Obama State Media gave Romney in his moment of triumph? Not one second.
So after watching the news and the lack of reporting last night, thinking maybe it was just a bit too much for the OSM to process the fact that the Republican infighting was finally coming to an end, I tune into the Obama loving farce that is Good Morning America this morning, and here’s the “news” we were treated to in place of Romney locking up the nomination:
Started with some five year old case of a British girl who went missing in Portugal at the age of four. Sad story for sure, but we’re starting the “news” broadcast with a story where the gist of it is that British police say they have some new leads (with no details provided) and they’re trying to bring the story back up to maybe get some more leads.
We then segue to a story about Prime Time Neon Deon Sanders and how his wife spent the last night in jail on a domestic violence call. Okay, Deon Sanders is one of the most high-profile athletes in America, so maybe this qualifies as legitimate news for a national news program, but seriously, this trumps the fact that we now know who’s going to be squaring off against Obama in the November election?
But the GMA broadcast gets even more ridiculous as it goes on, “Oh hey, Romney winning five of five primaries last night to become the GOP nominee is not worth a mention, but hey, look at this, there was this girl who was SO EXCITED over Obama’s visit to Boulder, Colorado, she actually spilled her frozen yogurt on his shoe!” Cut to shots of Obama all smiles, looking cool and saying no big deal.
NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL A NEWS STORY!
Listen, if you’re an Obama fan, you might think that every news broadcast should be straight Obama loving propaganda like this, but if you’re someone paying attention, someone who could vote either way, stay awake and realize that what you are watching when you view the news broadcasts of the alphabet channels of ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, PBS and MSNBC is the American equivalent of a full blown, state-controlled media. Watch these Obama cheerleaders masquerading as journalists and realize that in every way they can, they are trying to do the thinking for you.
I can remember a controversy that once brewed when a prime time episode of CBS’ 60 Minutes bleeped the use of the n-word while in the very same interview, let the word “kike” go broadcast untouched. I wish I could source it, but this was way older than the Internet and yet my recollection of the ensuing controversy is very clear. And at the time, I can remember an equal part of me both understanding the controversy over this double-standard in CBS’ treatment of the two slurs as well as an equal part of me understanding why one racial slur in America might be more detestable and bleep-worthy than all others.
Had it been a German broadcast, might have been the other way around, but in America, as much as I truly believe this is the greatest nation ever assembled on God’s Green Earth, the n-word in many ways encapsulates what is unquestionably the most shameful chapter in our entire history.
From what I understood going into this blog post, and backed up by the Wikipedia entry with four sources quoting the word’s origins, the n-word began as a neutral term, and while centuries of slavery and brutal oppression gave the mere sound of the word a hateful ring to our modern ears, reading works as recent as the late 19th and early 20th century writers such as Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway, you can read the n-word in their writings and still sense the word being used without any malice, in more of a de facto term sort of way. (In much the same way as hearing the term “negro” used innocently in the 1970s and 80s, and I remember it being used by newscasters both black and white at the time.)
What was most interesting about the evolution of the use of the n-word, however, was the fact that the more and more white people were getting a grip on how offensive the term was, how it shouldn’t be used in polite company and yes, many people do get raised properly to believe that if you wouldn’t tell a joke in mixed circles, probably best not to tell it behind people’s backs, the more white people wouldn’t use the term in public and (hopefully) in their own private conversations, the more the term began to be embraced by the black community.
This is not to suggest that blacks using the n-word to reference each other is some sort of recent phenomenon, I’m sure it goes back as far as the word’s origins, but with the explosion of rap music in the 80s, the “What’s up, my brotha?” of the 60s and 70s definitely gave way predominantly to, “What’s up, my n*****?”
I can remember being sort of shocked by an NWA coming out with the “N” right there in their name and my jaw dropping at Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg dropping about 150 n-bombs on a 60 minute CD of The Chronic, but I also totally got it. “You white folks want to call us a bunch of n*****s? Damn straight I’m a n*****. Proud of it, too.” I totally understood how they were reinventing the word and reclaiming the word for themselves.
That being said, however, at this point, I would be so happy to never hear another person of any skin color use that word again. I would never be so presumptuous as to try to tell any black person how they can or can’t reference themselves and each other, but to me now when I hear that word, it sounds to me like someone saying, “we are never going to get beyond the past.” That is my hope and my prayer, that one day we can get beyond that past.