Posted by Nili
This is my first guest post, and I want to thank Carpetbagger for asking me. I am a great fan of the blog and of the ‘bagger himself. Now, on with the show.
I hate to fan the flames of this any longer, but Frank Rich at The New York Times did a great job Sunday of peeling back the curtain on the phony “issue” of the Monday Night Football/Deperate Housewives promo. There are a lot of interesting items in his piece, and I will list a few.
Let’s begin with the “moral values” answer given by 22% of voters polled on Nov. 2nd. Did you know (I didn’t, and Rich points out that it was a British publication that ran this) that at 22%, the number of voters citing moral values as their prime concern has dropped significantly over the previous two elections?
That’s right, folks. 35% gave that answer in 2000, and a whopping 40% in 1996, when re-electing Bill Clinton. I suppose caring most about moral values is a privilege for those living under never-before-seen levels of peace and prosperity, as we were in those years.
Here’s another one: On the morning after the promo ran, just two neswpapers mentioned it. Just two, and both in Philadelphia, whose star player was in the promo. “A spokesman for ABC Sports told the (Philadelphia) Inquirer that he hadn’t received a single phone call or e-mail in the immediate aftermath…” Nothing happened for about 24 hours.
How about the fact that the original one-time broadcast by now has generated over 50,000 FCC complaints (though they cannot verify how many individuals sent them), but the multiple re-plays of the segment from ESPN to CNN to The View to local news all over the country have not generated one single complaint.
Rich wraps with the hopeful message that even with all the “opportunistic ayatollahs” running the government by and for the religious right, entertainment rules in our country, too, and these phony moralists don’t know what they are up against.
“… perhaps the most revealing barometer of the real state of play … is Desperate Housewives itself. A hit everywhere, it is even a bigger hit in Oklahoma City than it is in Los Angeles, bigger in Kansas City than it is in New York. All those public moralists who wail about all the kids watching Nicollette Sheridan on Monday Night Football would probably have apoplexy if they actually watched what Sheridan was up to in her own series – and then looked closely at its Nielsen numbers.”
My point is, stand pat, people. “Controversies” like this one are bound to pop up once in a while, especially when there are so many column inches and airtime minutes to fill. But the reality is that people are, and should be, much more concerned about real things like their own ability to feed and clothe their families than about what others see on TV. Unfortunately they need to be.