“Smear” rhetoric aside (not having seen the show, I’ve no way to judge it, nor do I trust the predictable reaction from the Kerry campaign team), it certainly feels like…
“Smear” rhetoric aside (not having seen the show, I’ve no way to judge it, nor do I trust the predictable reaction from the Kerry campaign team), it certainly feels like an escalation of the awful campaigning-by-media-proxy trend of the current election cycle for the Sinclair broadcast group to preempt normal programming for an anti-Kerry film.
Sinclair has told its stations — many of them in political swing states such as Ohio and Florida — to air “Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal,” sources said. The film, funded by Pennsylvania veterans and produced by a veteran and former Washington Times reporter, features former POWs accusing Kerry — a decorated Navy veteran turned war protester — of worsening their ordeal by prolonging the war. Sinclair will preempt regular prime-time programming from the networks to show the film, which may be classified as news programming, according to TV executives familiar with the plan.
Because what this campaign needs, of course, is more mudslinging.
On the other hand, I tend to fall on the side of free speech (and free criticism thereof) in such things. How many of the folks protesting Sinclair’s actions here would be objecting if they were broadcasting Fahrenheit 911 (which, in fact, may show up the night before the election on pay-per-view), or a Moveon.org anti-Bush documentary? I seriously doubt it.
Classifying the broadcast as “news” strikes me the same as classifying F911 as a “documentary,” and putting on a discussion panel to which Kerry is invited doesn’t seem to be “fair” (and, thus, may be subject to FCC action) — but, then, I’d still rather put such stuff out there and let people refute it than try to silence it ahead of time. Free speech needs to outweigh civility and fairness, especially in an environment where civility seems to have already gone by the wayside, and fairness is well on its way there, too.
Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself. She is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.
      — Thomas Jefferson
Of course, I’m also not convinced by any means that what either Kerry or Bush were doing three decades or so ago bear that much relevance to what they are doing or proposing to do now.
(via BoingBoing)
This month’s Rocky Mountain Blog Roundup finally has an entry by me (i.e., I finally got around to submitting something). Those who follow the comments here will guess, correctly, it’s my post on quality vs. quantity in electoral participation (a false binary decision, to be sure, but I’d rather see more folks voting than fewer, even if the fewer are somehow deemed to be “better informed”).
I never really did believe a man could fly, and even the best of the Superman movies (
