NBC backs down on Freedom's Watch ads
in which we once again learn that RedState is a very influential member of the media
By Jeff Emanuel Posted in Anti-war liberals | Liberals | Media — Comments (26) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Scott at Power Line reports that NBC has backed down (or "has decided to amend its standards and practices") from its refusal to air the Freedom's Watch holiday ads thanking the troops.
Is it merely a coincidence that this public reversal came just over three hours after the Majority Accountability Project, on this site, revealed that "the NBC lawyer who refused to allow [the ads had] donated at least $45,000 to a host of Congressional Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, New York Senator Hillary Clinton and the campaign committees of House and Senate Democrats"?
I prefer to think not. Either way, though, the ads are going to get the airplay that they deserve this holiday season -- a good result however you view this case.
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NBC backs down on Freedom's Watch ads 26 Comments (0 topical, 26 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
denial of service to Freedom's Watch by a Democrat lemming. The total disgust of we the people and our calls to local NBC affiliates and emails to the corporate office of NBC is what made the difference.
I say it constantly and I will say again these idiots are living in the 90's and have not quite grasped the extent of new media.
Freedom of Religion not Freedom from Religion
We should all take this moment to be thankful that the public has information about who donates to which candidates, and in what amount. These are the kinds of effective (and imperfect) fixes we need to our political system to keep it all honest and above-board.
"I can say - not as a patriotic bromide...that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and...the only moral country in the history of the world. - Ayn Rand
I rather suspect that 3 hours was not enough time to have a direct impact on NBC. I think it more likely that it was the calls of many Americans perhaps supplemented by pressure from financial backers (and/or advertisers) that tipped the balance.
Now I would pull the ad funding and place it on another network!
And congratulations RS for a job well done!
Jaded made an interesting observation regarding the new media. It is evident that many in the old media don't see the effect of the new media. I wonder if this election cycle will be seen as the one where the balance of power shifts from the old media to the new? We've seen some of this before, of course, (2004 outing of Rather's forged documents) however will this be the watershed where campaign tactics change (not necessarily for the better) in response to the reach & investigative ability of the new media?
Let's bring them back from that horrible ill-conceived and meaningless war and thank them in person, and pray for the departed ones who died.
The way to make their lives mean something is to vote for Ron Paul in 2008.
RON PAUL for the long haul 2008
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
We don't have 24 hour moderation, but when they get back in the morning, they get back with a vengeance, heh.
You'd have thought the dinosaur media would have got the message by now. Maybe they're not as intellectually superior as they obviously think they are.
As far back as 1998 the New Media was making an impact. The Lewinsky story would never have got out had it not been for Matt Drudge.
We're getting stronger, they're getting weaker. Long may it continue.
...that Abraham Lincoln had to endure riots in both NYC and DC against the war. Lincoln was called orangutan, chimpanzee and cretin by his contemporaries and even had to sneak back into DC once disguised as a woman.
Were are the monuments to the rioters and the name callers located today?
As long as the history of Liberty and Democracy are written by Westerners, Dan Rather and Mary Mapes being retired, the stories of those who strove to expand the frontiers of Liberty and Democracy, such as men like Abraham Lincoln, will be extolled. Your hatred and contempt of George W Bush will be interred with you in your grave. The record of his attempt to bring Democracy to the Arab World and the failure of the American People to assist in that effort will survive.
Here what I imagine Ron Paul saying in 1864:
What are we doing? We're trampling the constitution, jailing people, invading a peaceful neighbor in an illegal war? And for what? To steal property? That's all the Emancipation Proclamation is! Theft! It's time we brought our troops home, end the draft, and let the Confederates have their country back!
We can't afford this war! Peace and sound money now!
He'd probably also be tacitly backing theories that the troops who fired on Fort Sumter were actually US troops in disguise.
If they haven't gotten it by now why would anyone think they'll ever get it ?
One must recall that these reptiles call themselves progressive. If you're dumb and narrow enough to equate government power with progress you are hardly on a fast track learning mode.
As was said of the Bourbons, they remember everything and learn nothing.
"a man's admiration for absolute government is proportinate to the contempt he feels for those around him". Tocqueville
Let's not forget what NBC did here; it was an insulting attempt at freedom of the speech engineered by a so called guardian of that very same freedom. Let's not forget that General Electric is the parent, and they are equally culpable in this little escapade for creating an environment at NBC that promotes this kind of thinking (i.e. Chrissy Matthews and Keith "Dumb Butt" Olbermann). And lastly, when you think about blatant double talk from both sides of your mouth, just look at what NBC was doing here (bitch slapping the troops) while at the same time, it's parent company GE, was counting it's profits from their military components for it's military contracts selling engines and other materials.
I don't think it's useful to think of corporations as self-aware creatures. They are merely organizational forms. The distinction — and we will err if we do not recognize it — is that there is no "NBC" who did anything here, and there is no sentient "General Electric" that 'promotes' such behavior by a sentient NBC.
A human being did this, in particular a liberal lawyer who saw an opportunity to use his little sandbox of authority to stick it to some conservatives. If he thought about free speech at all, it was only in the sense of recognizing that he had the power to curtail it for some loathsome right-wingers, together with a belief that he could quietly do so without consequence. He probably believes the latter because he has silenced conservative voices dozens of times, and this is the first time anyone has ever called him on it.
It would be a mistake to punish "NBC" for this because the pain would get lost; virtually no one working there would feel a thing. Each shareholder would lose 2 one-hundredths of a cent, and that would be that.
No, the right way to deal with this is to install a very large eye directly behind Mr. Cotton's desk, and to make it clear to Mr. Cotton that the eye will be watching him like a hawk. Human life, as he has known it, will be ruined. His "Little Hitler" act where he gets to play füerher with other people's politics is over, which will probably drain 80% of the fun from his job. Which he deserves.
It is true that Mr. Cotton could feel reasonably sure that no consequences would flow from his action, because virtually everyone he works with is also a partisan liberal. Had others been in a position to spike the airing of a conservative viewpoint, they'd have done the same thing. Indeed, hundreds of employees of NBC and its subsidiaries do exactly this every day. Mr. Cotton was merely following in the footsteps of the journalists and entertainers he works with. All them have a cause: the promotion of the 'progressive' agenda. Silencing conservatives and lending a megaphone to liberals is their mission.
The only way we can get them to stop is to identify them as individuals (Dan Rather, Rick Kaplan, this Cotton fellow) and cause them grief in their careers by exposing their abuse of their positions. If we do enough of that, we will eventually build a deterrent that keeps some of the others honest.
Drink Good Coffee. You can sleep when you're dead.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
I undestand your point regarding thinking of corporations as self-aware creatures, but I would argue there is a sentient GE and NBC. If you think these things happen in a vacumn you're seriously mistaken. Every decision, such as refusing this ad, is discussed ad nauseum by the personnnel in the reponsible units. If there's even a suggestion of possible "blow-back", the decision is run up the corporate chain - department, deivision, corporate office, whatever it may be. It's called covering your ass in corporate speak. How high it goes will depend on the issue, but to think it's made by one person, sitting at a desk at NBC or GE, is grossly mistaken. And believe me, unless things have completely unraveled since I experienced the corporate culture, this little exercise at NBC this weekend had the corporate maven's cell phones chiming all over Connecticut until they pulled the ad. Oh, and don't even think this little misjudgment will go unaddressed at the upcoming Board of Directors meeting on this coming Tuesday.
I dunno, I think they review dozens of ads every day and unless there's a wardrobe malfunction they don't spend much time on any of 'em. In hindsight this was a Big Deal™, but did the guy making the call really know that in advance? I doubt it.
Hanging around on conservative web sites makes us forget the stifling liberalism that permeates many workplaces. Media companies will have that in spades. Remember the woman at MSNBC who last week referred to President Bush as "the monkey" in a newscast? That rolled off her tongue as easily as it did because everyone in her office calls him that, every day. To her, it was perfectly normal usage. Doesn't everybody refer to the President of the United States as "the monkey" or "the chimp"? Everyone she knows does.
Same thing with this lawyer. I'll bet he doesn't know a single soul who isn't vehemently against the war. Everybody is against the war. Well, except for a handful of wingnuts. That's the ocean he swims in. I'll bet he took one look at that ad, thought "Accckk, they're glorifying the war!" and crossed it off the list never expecting to hear about it again. War-mongering Bushbots. Nobody wants to hear that.
Granted, after the fact some excrement came rolling down the hill into the office where this happened, but you watch: nobody's going to get fired over this. The media has already dropped it like a hot rock.
Drink Good Coffee. You can sleep when you're dead.
However, I can tell you from experience, whether it was a lawyer or a marketing type who made the decision, he or she was not alone. I can also tell you that, as it relates to this particular incident, for the decision to be overtunred in 48 hrs and over a weekend, means alot of people heard alot of noise and alarm bells were heard throughout NBC and GE. So whatever the rationale for rejecting the ad, or whatever the political persuasions are of the people involved, I'm not certain they're enjoying their weekend and that's a good thing. They deserved the flack they got, and although it might not change a damn thing in terms of their day to day operations, at least they know there's someone out there ready to hold their feet to the fire when they overstep their bounds.
....Abraham Lincoln had to endure reports of riots against him in New York City and Washington DC. His contemporaries also called him an orangutan, chimpanzee, and cretin. On one occasion Lincoln had to reenter DC disguised as a woman. George W is in some very distinguished company in those events. How many monuments have they erected in honor of Lincoln's name callers or the rioters of his time?
We have reached a unique point in American History when this nation has learned how to vote itself every perk and benefit possible out of the public treasury, but has completely forgotten that freedom isn't free.
Last time it was the liberal United Church on the Green of New Haven, CT. NBC and CBS refused to air their commercial welcoming LGBT people to their services and their community.
The same excuse was given. It was too controversial.
The difference in this case is that the network based its original decision on content of the cited website. The only change in the network's position was to no longer enforce their controversial material standards on cited internet content.
If Freedom Watch were to make an commercial tomorrow that included the material from the website, it would not be shown. The same is true for any analogous liberal organization.
All of the major networks have this filter and it needlessly restricts political speech of all flavors. We should all be fighting for removal of controversial topic restrictions from commercial guidelines. Freer airwaves are better airwaves. The same holds true for digital information streams.
BTW the W, Lincoln analogy does not work and neither does the US Civil War, Iraq War analogy; at least not outside of a very small crowd.
I'd find it really depressing that someone could rise to be chief legal counsel to one of the big three networks while being such a nitwit. Partisanship is much more palatable for this.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777