i had another opening. ava wanted to reply to an asshole who wrote the third estate sunday review. she wanted to do it here to reply immediately and not wait for sunday when 3rd publishes. she's already phoned to ask if she can delete the post.
no problem. but i'll leave in my remarks to the asshole:
i helped with that editorial so i know what it says. we don't need someone trying to rescue john roberts junior. jim encourages that crap because he replies to those lunatics.
let me boil it down to you if you're in a hurry. the editorial basically says 'we don't think john roberts junior is qualifed to be an apple.' the idiot writes us 'well other people have been apples in the past!' so what? loser. take it over to your right-wing buddies. no 1 on the left needs to hear from you. what a dumb ass ---- ----- is.
he's a right-winger for john roberts junior and he thinks we're running some mainstream community, that we're the new york times or something.
we're a community for the left.
only a dumb ass comes to any of our sites and expects to find something they'll agree with.
maybe this is how he gets his jollies?
maybe it gets him hot and bothered to write his nonsense?
who knows.
loser.
for mike, here's my democracy now link for the day:
72% of African-Americans Say Bush Doesn't Care About Them
A new USA Today Poll has found that 72 percent of African-Americans feel that President Bush does not care about the country's Black population. 67 percent of white respondents said he did.
i don't think it needs a lot of further comment. this is what african-americans are feeling. condi rice says 'that's not true!' well condi, it's what people are feeling. it is valid. and the gop and the bully boy have a history so if people want to make conclusions, especially after what happened in florida in 2000 and in ohio in 2004, they have every right to.
now let's talk about abc. c.i. and ava have both written about this and i'm offended as well.
colin powell put on the spot. he hems, he haws, he sputters. on tv. for the whole world to see.
and yet abc pretties it up.
i represented a pot head, tv actor once. he lit up during an interview. i knew that was going to make it into the story. but he also stumbled the higher he got.
i had to beg to get the starts and stops, the 'uhs' and the 'man's out of the interview. i did that because p.r. was my job.
(and because he was a teeny favorite who's image was that he was thoughtful and well spoken.)
to get the junk removed, i had to arrange an interview with this very minor magazine for a much bigger name. that was the trade off.
there was nothing journalistic about the trade off.
the reporter (and the magazine) wanted the bigger name. so they were willing to go along with me. my job was to make teen cheech not look like a chong.
if colin powell was my client, i would've done the same thing.
but i was in p.r. i wasn't a journalist.
p.r. ethics, such as they are, allowed me to do that. my job was to make a client look better than he or she was. short of committing a crime, anything i did to see that a client came off good was within the ethics of my profession.
but the journalist who not only removed the "uh"s and the "man"s but also added in a literary reference that the kid couldn't have made with a book open in front of him? the journalist wasn't upholding any ethics.
now that happens all the time in entertainment coverage.
'straight' actors and actresses drink too much and proposition the same-sex interviewer.
i'm not talking about flirting or flattery. the smart ones do that and the interview turns into its own seduction.
but they do sometimes do more. and it doesn't make into the published reporting. or when they're doing drugs.
tom cruise is getting his worst publicity ever. that has to do with the fact that pat kingsley is no longer there to protect him. he's no represented by his sister who is probably very loyal but she's in over her head (my opinion). she's also dealing with all the rules that kingsley laid down and all the demands that were made.
the press has wanted to trash tom cruise for years. mainly because of the rules imposed. including, but not limited to:
*10-20 minute interviews for a cover story
*being lied to - such as when tom cruise was about to divorce mimi rogers but reporters were told their marriage was great. when time and rolling stone hit the stands with their cover stories on tom cruise and the wonderful marriage, the daily news papers were already reporting that the marriage was over - and embarrassed.
*being told when it would run and being told that information gathered could only be used for that piece. not for a later piece.
there were many more rules.
tom cruise may or may not have wanted the rules. but the press was pissed for years. now he's got his sister representing him and stuff they would have covered up or ignored they now address.
over and over.
that's the way things go in entertainment reporting.
that's not supposed to be how real news is handled.
so why did abc clean up colin powell's quote?
why did they make him sound calm, smooth and not upset?
if powell comes off in print as he did on tv, what does that say?
does it say that he's not as determined if he's stammering? if he's saying 'uh' over and over?
from a public relations point of view it does.
his statement, from a p.r. point of view, are a nightmare.
he needs to be firm, resolute and the words just rolling off his tongue to reflect that we are at war and we need to be at war.
putting the truth in changes that.
read c.i.'s 'ABC "fixes" Colin Powell' and read ava's 'Note from Ava on ABC's altering Colin Powell's remarks' and realize how the so called 'news' will always suck up to certain individuals even if means altering the public record.
and read ava and c.i.'s "TV Review: Barbara and Colin remake The Way We Were" which will bring you the reality that abc doesn't want to.
