NPR, among other media outlets, did a piece on Ugly Betty, a new English-language show that is modeled on a Columbian telenovela, Betty La Fea. As North-American television begins to leap into the wildly popular genre of Latino/a telenovelas, I have to admit from time to time that I watch telenovelas in Spanish to work on my Spanish. But watching them in English? Not sure I can rationalize that!
Forgive me, for I have sinned. I missed the premiere of the controversial Book of Daniel because I was out having a drink with my lesbian sister and my boyfriend (with whom I have lived for 9 years and we have sex and we're not married) last Friday night. For the record, that's
1. alcohol
2. homosexuality
3. sex before marriage (and a whole lot of left-leaning politics that I won't get into here...)
Did I mention that my dad is a minister? (And that actually none of those are in the 10 commandments...)
On any given day, I can be a little petulant when I am being controlled. Call it the gift of perversity. Egalia over at Tennessee Guerrilla Women followed the antics of The American Family Association and Two Rivers Baptist Church in having the new NBC dramedy, The Book of Daniel banned from WSMV in Nashville.
And so, in solidarity, I watched the show this Friday night because Egalia wrote:
I didn’t see the show. Thanks to the vigilance of hyper sensitive Christians like Pastor Sutton and his politically active Mega Church, I won’t get the opportunity to make my own judgement. Since I am not a believer, I am absolutely certain that I would never ever hold the same views as Pastor Sutton. If, as I’ve heard, the series questions and pokes at old time religion, I might enjoy it, because I am, frankly, sick and tired of having Christianity rammed down my throat.
But that is the point, isn’t it? Disbelievers, pagans, subscribers to the theory of evolution, all of us are meant to be silenced.
I probably wouldn't have ever watched the show (because I don't have TiVo and who is really home on a Friday night?). However, I felt I needed to watch the show since it had also been banned in:
KBTV in Beaumont, Texas
WGBC in Meridian, Miss
KARK in Little Rock
WTWO in Terre Haute, Ind
KNSW in Wichita, Kan.
KSNG in Garden City, Kan.
KSNC in Great Bend, Kan.
KSNK in Oberlin, Kan.
Remind me not to move to Kansas. But more importantly, what's all of the hoopla?
Liberia elects "Iron Lady" Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Chile elects Michelle Bachelet. Here? Geena Davis gets a Golden Globe for playing a female president. Time to move?
As a kid, I didn’t grow up in a home where the television news dominated. Instead, my sister and I used to joke that the “lyrics” to the opening notes of NPR’s All Things Considered were “Time for Dinner, Time for Dinner...” My sister and I were taught that we needed to be "up" on the news and prepared to discuss current events at our dining room table. Dinner time was a time (and still is, when we're all home) to debate, discuss, and consider new ideas.
So, let’s talk about wave-ja-vous. Increasingly, the mainstream news is a cookie-cutter replication of a master script (come on—you only privilege certain news shows because you like the intonation of a particular voice or the “soft on the eyes” haircut of your favorite blonde spokesperson for the American Way—there’s no real difference here). Our current administration is not to blame for this, exactly.
The current trouble, however, is the public’s acquiescence to a sweeping conservative ideology. They accept news-truths without question. In print or on screen has come to equal universal truth. I'm thinking about Mary Poppins and her "spoonful of sugar to make the medicine to down." What's troubling about the current administration (and previous ones as well) is the way it uses the media to obfuscate basic truths.
THERE WERE NO WMDs. And yet? The American public either believes there were or doesn't care that there weren't. I could go on and on with other salient examples, but forget WMDs. I want to talk about HIV/AIDS. The Bush administration nominated Jerry Thacker to head up its Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS in 2003. This man publicly said that AIDS was a "gay plague."
The "Condom Fact Sheet" and "Programs that Work" were both removed from the CDC's website. "Safe sex" in the schools has been virtually removed from the curriculum and replaced with abstinence-only education. The CDC's highly successful education and prevention programs, created over 2 decades of struggle are being decimated. The Nation reports:
The new CDC regulations, published in the Federal Register, are mandatory for any AIDS-fighting organization that receives federal money for HIV prevention, and they finish the job of gutting effective, disease-preventing safe-sex education that has been a goal of the Bush Administration since it took office. Far from trying to "learn" from the Ugandans, the regs demand that any sex-ed "content" include information on the "lack of effectiveness of condom use." In other words, the Bush Administration wants AIDS-fighting organizations to tell people: Condoms don't work. At the same time, the regs mandate the teaching of the failed policy of abstinence from sex until (heterosexual) marriage.
Bush Administration officials, despite all scientific evidence to the contrary, have claimed that condoms are ineffective in the fight against AIDS. This is a lie. A 2001 NIH panel "concluded that consistent and correct condom use prevents (in addition, of course, to pregnancy) transmission of HIV between women and men and gonorrhea transmission from women to men." (See
the Guttmacher Report on Public Policy here.)
New To Alternative Media? Check These Tried and True Resources:
Accuracy in Media
Adbusters
AlterNet
CounterPunch
Feminist Majority Foundation (especially Court Watch)
Independent Media Center
In These Times
Lip Magazine
Media Awareness Project
The Nation
The Progressive
Project Censored
The Propaganda Remix Project
Utne
Z Magazine
This is PBU13 in association with the Progressive Blogger Union.
One thing I think we can do is to rely on sources that know particular topics well. I can't wade through all of the material on WMDs here. However, I can, having spent the last 15 years of my life researching HIV/AIDS, say a lot about the ways that the Bush policies are wrong and a new form of propaganda. I think we should all seek out alternative sources of information and promote them early and often. And, I think we have to make ourselves experts on the experts.
My point here is that in a culture that gets its news from Fox and the Daily News (oh, I dread the morning commute and seeing those scandalous headlines!), how do you begin to distill any sense of "truth" or "fact"?
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