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The Washington Times and the Washington Post both ran related stories Thanksgiving morning alleging that the current story behind the holiday is a bunch of pro-Pilgrim propaganda.
It looks like the Washington Post has found the ghost in the story, or maybe it’s the elephant under the bed. The topic is billionaire Philip Anschutz’s business dealings in sports and media. Doug LeBlanc took a look at the coverage earlier this year when Anschutz bought the San Francisco Examiner and found it to be remarkably light on religion.
Here’s another story from the tidal wave just after the election that has continued to bother me a bit. The headline was “G.O.P. Adviser Says Bush’s Evangelical Strategy Split Country” and the basic concept was that the Christian right has totally taken control of the Republican Party, according to veteran GOP consultant Arthur Finkelstein. It now has veto power over the party’s choice for president. (Hear that, Rudy?) Early on, he says: “From now on, anyone who belongs to the Republican Party will automatically find himself in the same group as the opponents of abortion, and anyone who supports abortion will automatically be labeled a Democrat.” Actually, if you read that statement in a mirror, you’d have a pretty good summary of the 2004 Democratic Party platform.
There’s been no mainstream media coverage of the moment yet, but Bono threw down another gauntlet for the FCC on Saturday Night Live this weekend. During the show’s closing credits, and while riffing on U2′s chestnut “I Will Follow,” Bono mounted an audience member’s lap and began thrusting.
Longtime New York Times television writer Bill Carroll has applied the blue America vs. red America motif to TV programming, finding that “choices of viewers, whether in Los Angeles or Salt Lake City, New York or Birmingham, Ala., are remarkably similar.”
Quite a few of you out in GetReligion land have joined me in the search for liberal paranoia about the smash hit status of The Incredibles.
This is a minor little lifestyles feature from last week, but it is still bugging me. There is a ghost in here, methinks. The topic is “third places,” which reporter Sherry Stripling of the Seattle Times defines as:
Retired Lt. Col. Ralph Peters has been a byline to watch for since he wrote a famous article for the Winter 2001 issue of Parameters, the deepthink journal of the U.S. Army War College. Titled "Stability, America’s Enemy," the wide-ranging piece argued that the U.S.’s strategic insistence on maintaining a superficial peace by keeping foreign regimes intact was misguided.
