NBC Supports the Politically Partisan Leno

The Hildebeaste was on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart the other day. Why no complaints about that?

Here's the NY Daily News story on Arnold/Leno:

Jay Leno is biting back at critics who claim he's become the late-night cuddle-toy of Arnold Schwarzenegger and President Bush. Political and media analysts yesterday took shots at the lantern-jawed comic - contending that Leno helped elect Schwarzenegger as California's governor by putting him on "The Tonight Show."

Having launched his campaign on Leno's show, Schwarzenegger declared victory there Tuesday night, and then returned Wednesday to scold Leno for looking at his watch during his acceptance speech. All that airtime gave "legitimacy to the notion that [the election] wasn't a partisan event," Marty Kaplan, associate dean of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School told the Washington Post. "It was like welcoming home an astronaut from a safe voyage. It played into a campaign strategy that this was a campaign for all, beyond politics."

L.A. Weekly columnist Nikki Finke suggested that Leno had become a "political pawn" for Schwarzenegger and that, ever since 9/11, "the Bush jokes are ...few and far between. That's made Leno a favorite on the lucrative corporate master-of-ceremonies circuit, since so many CEOs tilt Republican."

But Leno spokesman Bruce Bobbins insisted yesterday that the comedian never endorsed the Terminator. "They're just longtime friends," Bobbins told us after speaking with Leno. "He never had Arnold on during the campaign. He also booked [defeated governor] Gray Davis as a guest. " Bobbins also denied that Leno was leaning right to score more bucks as an emcee.

Davis spokesman Peter Ragone said, "Leno didn't endorse Schwarzenegger? Everyone in California thought he did."

"Several longtime network executives and producers of late-night shows expressed surprise that Mr. Leno had been willing to take a step that Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Conan O'Brien and other late-night hosts have never taken. "

Both Letterman and Carson, well-heeled multimillionaires, thanks to the capitalist entertainment industry, are outspoken leftists and Democrat supporters. With his personal; armed guards and walled enclave, Carson doesn't need his own gun.

Priceless.

The New York Times declares, "Kettle, you are black." Jay Leno is a comedian running a nightly show dedicated to jokes and entertainment. He's also somewhat conservative. The New York Times is an international company dedicated to objectively reporting events in its news publications. It's is also ultra-liberal. Between the two, guess which one's bias actually affects the quality of the work product they put out.

Tasty Manatees

Excellent summation!

"Robert Thompson, a professor of media and television studies at Syracuse University, said: "There's a big culture war raging in this country. These guys are supposed to be equal opportunity in their targets. Coming from an identifiable perspective throws off the calculus." "

EARTH TO BRAINIAC: SHUT UP, YOU STUPID HORSES ASS

But Leno spokesman Bruce Bobbins insisted yesterday that the comedian never endorsed the Terminator. "They're just longtime friends" . . .

Davis spokesman Peter Ragone said, "Leno didn't endorse Schwarzenegger? Everyone in California thought he did."

Which one of them is right? Both, and neither. Objectivity is impossible.
Tradition and history tell one story, current events seem to tell another. Tradition and history tell a conservative story. By focusing on the short-term things like a house burned down, and not noticing all the things that went well (e.g., all the people gainfully doing a day's work on the same day that the house burned down), the news inherently tells an anticonservative story.
Except on a 9/11, the news is just entertainment--and keeping a radio to your ear for a 9/11 report is paranoid. Entertainment is "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl." Journalism is mostly the "boy loses girl" part. The "boy meets girl" and the "boy gets girl" parts are the everyday blessings of God. They are great--but they don't make "good copy."
It is because journalism's role is entertainment that its perspective is inherently anticonservative. Journalism is the pilot fish of liberalism, and the prevailing propaganda wind down which demagogues sail. Journalists, liberal politicians, and all other celebrities who want to justify their celebrity by sounding profound simply flatter each other and make each other look good.
That system even applies to academia, except in sciences with a fairly firm attachment to reality--and even among scientists the desire to look intelligent without serious thought results in aggressively projecting PC attitudes outside the scientists' own disciplines. The system works by a get-along by going-along system, and it tends to dominate expensive, high-production-value media because it protects against risk.
But that system inherently limits the perspective its acolytes allow themselves to see; it is a system in which everyone agrees to avoid the extremes of left or right--but one in which everyone is so immersed in the self-congratulatory worldview of leftism that they also agree that there actually is no such thing as "left"--and that the divide is between "moderates" and "right-wing extremists."
Journalists critique the rest of society, and conservatives in particular, from a leftist point of view--but deny the very existence of their own POV. Conservatives, OTOH, accept the fact that they do indeed have a POV. By accepting that their POV has a name rather than being the absence of a POV, conservatives are self-critical and admit that they critique journalism and the rest of society from that POV.
Conservatives are very uncomfortable with demagoguery and go-along-to-get-along compromise of principle, and that makes them pariahs to the go-along-to-get-along crowd. They are the curve-breakers who see the establishment's underwear and are unwilling to pretend otherwise. Their reward from the establishment--from journalism, from academia, from Hollywood--is scorn, ridicule, and vituperation.
Thus conservatives see journalism's codes of ethics, and laugh bitterly. You do not need a code of ethics to know how to treat your friends kindly--and a "code of ethics" which is not, and can never be, enforced against your abuse of your critics is a facade. Such enforcement would have to come from the very establishment which brooks no criticism of itself.
"The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves." The First Amendment designs a system of open debate, and of judgement of that debate by we-the-people and not by the government. The liberal establishment is illegitimate by its own standards, but not by those of the Constitution and conservative principle, except to the extent that the government entangles itself in political decisions pertaining of right only to the people themselves.
The solution to this conundrum is not for conservatives to apply liberal standards to liberalism, but to ridicule the liberal standards themselves. We have to laugh "objective" journalism out of the court of public opinion. And with its mock-bombastic "talent on loan from God", "all-seeing all-knowing Maja Rushie", "truth detector and Doctor of Democracy", and so forth, that is exactly the project of the Rush Limbaugh Show.

http://www.FreeRepublic.com/forum/a3ba20deb5ac5.htm

bump to a good train of thought!

"Mr. Zucker argued that Mr. Leno was exercising his rights as a private citizen, and that he was an entertainment figure and therefore not subject to journalistic ethics."

I must admit, this leaves me scratching my head. I have read several journalistic codes of ethics and they tend to forbid journalists from being involved in political activities at all. The morons think that apparently covering up their activities by simply doing it with journalistic reporter activitism somehow makes them ethical.

I recently put up some ethics codes in the college newspaper office, but had to go through several before I found one that didn't have this bit of hypocrisy.

He was not endorsing a candidate, he was introducing the Governor. Big Difference!

I was suprised to see Leno do it, but I didn't see it as partisan.

When Arnold went on Leno's show to announce whether he was running or not, that gave big ratings to Leno. I looked at it more as a "thank you".

Confront and ridicule these shameless hypocrites at every opportunity, within every news cycle, in every conversation.

You will be astounded by the influence a single voice commands.

Good point (Freepers are so smart...)!

Didn't Larry King stand at the podium of a fundraiser with Clinton and that Palm Beach woman with the big (**)?

Those man on the street interviews are educational, aren't they? I love 'em. And as long as Jay makes people laugh, he doesn't need to worry about alienating anybody, IMO.

Several longtime network executives and producers of late-night shows expressed surprise that Mr. Leno had been willing to take a step that Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Conan O'Brien and other late-night hosts have never taken.

Uh...ya right.

Putting opinion anywhere but on the editorial/op-ed pages is "a violation of journalistic ethics." I am shocked--shocked to learn that people who "want to make a difference" have been seen trying to make a difference.
Journalistic ethics codes tell you how journalists will not treat liberals--and how they will treat conservatives.