How did the pursuit of equality become joined with an enemy of equality, the double standard, the kind regularly seen and fed by and on TV?
Try this one on:
When I see Mel Gibson on TV my blood runs angry. Although we’ve never met, Gibson doesn’t like me because I’m a Jew. In turn, I don’t like him for the same reason — I’m a Jew.
What am I supposed to do, look past it, get over it? Enjoy his movies, anyway?
He’s a born and raised anti-Semite. His nut-job father, among other things, denies that the Holocaust was all that bad. And his son learned well, for example spewing anti-Jewish slurs at the non-Jewish cop who arrested him for drunken driving.
So lately, as TV commercials for Gibson’s new movie appear, and earlier this month, when Gibson appeared on NBC as a presenter of a Golden Globes award — host Ricky Gervais only poked fun at Gibson’s fondness for excessive drinking; Gibson’s anti-Semitism was politely indulged by all.
It got me to thinking about what it would have taken for Gibson to have genuinely suffered the slings, arrows and fortunes of race and/or religion-based hatred.
No wishful thinking here. Just the honest application of what you and I know about TV and modern American life.
Do you think that if Gibson’s father proclaimed South African apartheid and/or American slavery to be exaggerated — no big deals — and if Gibson then delivered a drunken, hate-filled spew about African-Americans, he’d have been invited, two weeks ago, to the podium at the Golden Globes?
If Gibson swapped Jews for blacks, do you suppose that TV networks would have accepted advertising for a new movie starring Mel Gibson?
Just asking, that’s all.
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The Tiger Woods saga has served to again reveal the phony, high-brow elitism in TV network news.
On Monday’s “Today” show, in a 10-minute report — 10 minutes! — on the latest rumors about Woods’ escapades (not to be confused with his Escalade), NBC News’ Peter Alexander reported that the scandal “unleashed a series of tabloid headlines.”
Yup, within a 10-minute report dishing the latest dirt on Tiger Woods, NBC News pointed to tabloid newspapers for making such a big deal out the story.
But not all pretend to be above it all.
CBS’s “Sunday Morning” news and magazine program — almost always a steady, well-produced and honest enterprise — reported on Woods’ inpatient treatment for “sex addiction,” asking whether such a disease is legit or just a sympathetic term to explain the chronic sexual misconduct of those wealthy enough to be treated for a sex addiction.
After all, what do middle-class folks take for their sex addictions, a cold shower?
And one of the folks shown in a reel of noted, outside-their-relationships sex hounds on CBS’s “Sunday Morning” report was CBS’ David Letterman.
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It comes as no surprise that Fox has delayed the premiere of “Our Little Genius,” a prime-time quiz show starring contestants ages 6 to 12, after someone discovered that some kids were provided, ahem, pertinent “information” prior to the taping of the first eight shows.
Among all the unbelievable “real” people seen on TV, none are more unbelievable than unbelievable kids.
From its start, Fox’s “Are You Smarter Than A Fifth-Grader?” never passed real world smell tests. In addition to being exceptionally knowledgeable, those kids are just too precocious and too stage-comfortable to believe that they aren’t, to some extent, stage kids, and rehearsed ones, at that. Okay, maybe one or two could be legit, but all of them?
Hey, “The Brady Bunch” kids rehearsed all week and still looked and sounded rehearsed – and like no kids, even the smartest ones, we ever knew.
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Things that look kinda pathetic: Barry Manilow on the QVC home shopping channel, last week, hawking his new album.