Sunday Morning Deep Thought

FOX "news" really is
FAIR and BALANCED!!

(Who'd a thunk?)

My first internet stops every morning are to Crooks and Liars and Glenn Greenwald. As it happens, both sites were being rather critical of what Station Agent has dubbed the Lamestream Media (abbreviated LaMe) and I would like to call the Lamestream Mediocre, except that most of the time they don't even rise to the level of mediocrity.

Somehow my morning mind (sometimes a little foggy until at least the second cup of strong coffee) had a moment of the utmost clarity. I guess I was thinking, "how does FOX "news" get away with calling themselves fair and balanced, anyway?"

I came up with an answer almost immediately. Got a dictionary handy? Never mind, we can use Merriam Webster's online. Here's the relevant portions of their main entry for the word FAIR (adj.):

1: pleasing to the eye or mind especially because of fresh, charming, or flawless quality

2: superficially pleasing : specious (she trusted his fair promises)

6a: marked by impartiality and honesty : free from self-interest, prejudice, or favoritism (a very fair person to do business with)

6b (1): conforming with the established rules : allowed (2): consonant with merit or importance : due (a fair share)

6c: open to legitimate pursuit, attack, or ridicule (fair game)

9: not dark (fair skin)

So, quite obviously FOX is implying that they conform to definition 6, but really they mean that they're fair in the sense of definitions 1, 2 and 9. I would say with an emphasis on 2 (and you should really click on the definition of specious if you don't already know it) and 9. And thank Gawd for 6c, though I don't think FOX wanted to imply that definition.

In short, fair and balanced can be taken to mean, "we present you with good-looking, mostly blond newsmodels who at least have the capacity to not fall off of their chairs."

Nor has this escaped those who watch FOX with a rather more critical eye than their target audience do. Media Matters' Simon Malloy did an article on Alternet about the rampant sexism on FOX back in 2006.

A person idly watching Fox News all day, for example, has an excellent chance of glancing at the screen and seeing some partial nudity or a male Fox News personality hitting on a female colleague on the air. Scantily clad women and on-air sexual harassment are the orders of the day over at Fox News Channel.

Take, for instance, Fox News' premier business news program, Your World with Neil Cavuto. Cavuto, Fox News' vice president of business news and the worst James Bond since Timothy Dalton, regularly shows footage of Victoria's Secret runway models and Playboy bunnies -- presumably in the name of business.

Cavuto also has a special obsession with a certain football game played every year in early February: the Lingerie Bowl. Last February, Cavuto interviewed two Lingerie Bowl contenders in their -- ahem -- uniforms. As the News Hounds blog pointed out at the time, this interview was preceded by a one-on-one with Focus on the Family's James C. Dobson, who said that parents must monitor what their children are "looking at because pornography is everywhere, as you [Cavuto] know."

The hypocrisy is phenomenal. Not surprising though when you consider that the greatest consumption of pornography is in the Red States that FOX targets. And they don't really care if a few people in that audience pick up on it either. This little gem appeared in the New York Post (to whom I shall not link) back in 2007. Note the reaction.

CHRISTIAN "media watchdog group" The Resistance is all worked up over the ultra-femme anchors of Fox News. The group's leader, Mark Dice, rants in an e-mail, "I see shorter skirts on the women of Fox News than I do on the prostitutes being arrested on cop shows." Fox responded, "We're always flattered to have everyone talking about us in one form or another."

It may flatter FOX, but I wonder how the objectified newsmodels themselve feel about it? No matter, they're probably grateful for the high paying jobs they hold more for the Clairol™-enhanced outside of their pretty little heads than whatever's on the inside. How grateful? Just go to YouTube and do a search for Megyn Kelly legs" (47 videos!) "Megyn Kelly upskirt" (28) "Gretchen Carlson upskirt" or "Gretchen Carlson legs" (29 videos each.) Or just type "Hot Fox" in the search window and see how it auto-fills. "Hot Fox News Women" has a whopping 314 hits, so don't tell me their viewers aren't obsessing. Thanks to William Mark for this nice paste-up of the T&A FOX shows daily.

FOX News Exploits Sexuality
to Sell Lousy News Programming

But then, I don't really know. FOX isn't even a part of my satellite package.
(sigh)

TAGS: Sex SELLS!, Fox News Anchorwomen, Presstitution
Is this what they mean by a story that's got legs?

Bristol Palin By the Numbers

It's been a while since I've posted here. Got to get back to it.

I do not look down on Bristol Palin. She had the disadvantage of a poor sex education probably caused by her mother's ideology but she has the advantage that her mother has a good, if after the last weekend dead-end, career. She also has magnificent access to services (who wants to piss off a Governor known for abusing authority to get people fired) and, unfortunately, she's being presented as the model of virtuous teenaged womanhood for bearing her child to term.

She is not a role model we can afford to have splashed on screens everywhere, not for ideological reasons but for sheer facts. This from Janet Currie via Freakonomics:

• Bristol Palin is not alone. She is one of 750,000 American girls ranging in age from 15 to 19 who will likely become pregnant this year. It would be unfortunate if media reports about high-profile people like Ms. Palin help legitimize teen pregnancy.
• Given the decision to carry her pregnancy to term, Ms. Palin’s available resources and support will give her the best possible chance of a good outcome. But on average, teen pregnancies are more likely to result in premature births and low-birth-weight babies. This is not a good start in life. Babies with a low birth weight are more likely to have A.D.H.D. and are less likely to graduate from high school.
• Teen moms are less likely than other women to attend or complete college, and their marriages are more likely to end in divorce; about 50 percent of women who married younger than age 18 are divorced after 10 years, compared to 20 percent of women who married at age 25 or older. In turn, single mothers have the highest poverty rates of any demographic group, and 60 percent of the U.S.-born children in mother-only families are poor.
• Statistics are not destiny, and one can only hope Ms. Palin has a healthy baby, a long and happy marriage, and a sense of fulfillment as a homemaker, a career woman, or both. But the fact remains that for most women, a teen pregnancy considerably diminishes the odds of any happy ending.
• High teen pregnancy rates remain a serious problem in the U.S. Although they have declined since they peaked in 1990, rates are still twice as high as in Canada or England, and eight times as high as in the Netherlands or in Japan.
• These international differences are due to low contraceptive use in the U.S.; most of the recent decline in teen pregnancy in the U.S. is due to more consistent use of birth control, although teens are also waiting longer to have sex than in the past. In 1995, almost 20 percent of girls had sex by age 17, compared to 15 percent in 2002. Let us hope that attempts to normalize situations like Ms. Palin’s do not help to reverse this trend.

Some observations, not to Ms. Palin's liking:

• Abstinence-only education does not work. Her own daughter is a case in point.
• Contraception is the only known way to limit or prevent abortions; however, if conception begins at birth, contraception is abortion and is to be outlawed.
• Since they don't want contraception and they don't want abortion and they want to preach abstinence-only despite its failure, I can only conclude the Right is anti-sex, although Ms. Palin appears to have enjoyed (or tolerated) it at least five times.
• Statistically, teen mothers have it bad throughout life. They're less educated, the babies are more likely to be underweight at birth, they're more likely to have economic problems through life.
• Statistically there are always exceptions: Palin with her support network and successful mother will most likely be one. Lance Armstrong was one. There are people without high school educations making over $100,000 per year. They are rare.
• Single mothers have the highest poverty rate of any demographic group.

I'm not advocating abortion. I'm advocating prevention, the use of our God-given intelligence and a few fortuitous chemical reactions in the body to prevent unwanted pregnancies. I advocate sex education in schools, fact-based and frank, to give women like Bristol Palin the tools they need when abstinence fails. I'm advocating the morning-after pill, readily available and pulling the licenses of pharmacists who refuse to sell contraceptives. I'm advocating a fact-based approach to reducing abortions in this country.

Unfortunately it's not faith-based, as Bristol Palin's education must have been. She and her baby will most likely do well. 750,000 other teen mothers and their children have a much lesser chance of doing so. And given the Right's refusal to provide aid to those mothers and children, indeed their tendency to ignore them until they're old enough to enlist, I dub the Right the party of Right to Birth.

And here's a link to what the average teen mother can expect from life. And that's why we can't have Bristol Palin paraded before the country as a paragon of virtue and an example for teens.

Links to the original Freakonomics blog post here, including links to Janet Currie's papers.

Cross-posted from A Colorado Progressive.

TAGS: Bristol Palin, Teen Pregnancy

Lesbians Face Court Challenge From Lesbians

Girl-on-Greek Fight Over Rights to the 'L Word'

I am NOT making this up.

From the BBC:

Campaigners on the Greek island of Lesbos are to go to court in an attempt to stop a gay rights organisation from using the term "lesbian".
[...]
The issue boils down to who has the right to call themselves Lesbians. Is it gay women, or the 100,000 people living on Greece's third biggest island - plus another 250,000 expatriates who originate from Lesbos?

The man spearheading the case, publisher Dimitris Lambrou, claims that international dominance of the word in its sexual context violates the human rights of the islanders, and disgraces them around the world. He says it causes daily problems to the social life of Lesbos's inhabitants.

In court papers, the plaintiffs allege that the Greek government is so embarrassed by the term Lesbian that it has been forced to rename the island after its capital, Mytilini.

An early court date has now been set for judges to decide whether to grant an injunction against the Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece and to order it to change its name.

C'mon - the term embarrasses the Greek government?! And violates the human rights of the inhabitants of Lesbos, even disgraces them around the world? That's a little heavy handed, don't you think? Let's try to put things in perspective here.

And think about the possible consequences. What if you end up facing future lawsuits from Melissa Etheridge (pictured with life partner Tammy Lynn Michaels) over the inconvenience and expense of having to change all her publicity bios to read 'Mytilinian?' Because you know that's what they're going to start calling themselves if you win this thing. And who knows, even Dick Cheney might find a way to take offense. He's not exactly stable you know.

..Not to mention the possible reaction from the people of Sodom, Israel. 'Cause you just know they're going to want a piece of this if this lawsuit is successful.

(note: this is where I was going to end the post with a terrific YouTube clip of a classic Saturday Night Live sketch - the Chamber of Commerce of Sodom discussing a promotion campaign for the upcoming tourist season.

Dan Aykroyd's character summed it up, "sure we've got all those other things - great hotels, fine dining, sightseeing. But let's face it, most of the tourists come here for the sodomy." In the end the Chamber decided to keep their slogan from the previous year, "come for the sodomy, stay for all that other stuff."

You'll just have to imagine it. Take my word, it was hilarious.)

TAGS: Gender Identity, Humor, Melissa Etheridge, Isle of Lesbos

Bearing the Fruit of Fascist Theocracy

To protect citizen's health care rights, Washington state regulators ruled that pharmacists may not refuse to dispense any medication based on personal convictions. In Washington state, a pharmacy owner and two pharmacists sued the Washington State Department of Health because the ruling infringed on their right to deny any medication based on their personal beliefs.

In this case, the pharmacists have issues with "Plan B", the "morning after" birth control pill.

Plan B works by using high doses of common birth control medication to prevent implantation of a fertilized egg. Opponents regard it as a form of abortion. It is not the same as RU-486, the so called "abortion pill", and has no effect if a woman is already pregnant.

To my seemingly never ending irritation, these rogue pharmacists equate birth control with abortion, to which they seek to prevent access. I have already shared my views on abortion. Preventing access to legal birth control should be, in my view, illegal.

Last week a federal judge suspended the rule, to the delight of the rebel pharmacists who claimed it had violated their religious freedoms to obstruct women's ability to purchase critical medications in a safe and legal manner.

A preliminary injunction granted by U.S. District Judge Ronald B. Leighton prevents the state from disciplining pharmacists who refuse to dispense the medication, known as Plan B, as long as they immediately refer patients to nearby sources.

By allowing pharmacists to delay medication, the injunction enables pharmacists to render the medication ineffective:

The injunction creates a system in which pharmacists can refuse to fill a request for Plan B if they refer customers to a nearby source. But that could effectively deny the drugs completely to residents in rural areas, said Jet Tilley, spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of the Inland Northwest. Advocates argue that women must have access to the medication as soon as possible for it to be effective.

Does this mean that rural women who are denied "Plan B" medication based on a pharmacist's personal conviction, are sent to look for legal medication elsewhere, try but are unable to obtain their legal medication in time for it to be effective, can sue the rogue pharmacist and pharmacy for 18 years of child support? I want to know the answer to that.

Fortunately, State Senator, Karen Keiser, D-Kent, is working to propose legislation that will prohibit pharmacists from denying access to legal medications.

As much as these events anger me, they fit right in with the "rampant sexism" that is institutionally supported by the Bush administration. Under Bush:

W. David Hager chairman of the FDA's Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee does not prescribe contraceptives for single women, does not do abortions, will not prescribe RU-486 and will not insert IUDs. Hager believes that headaches, PMS and eating disorders can be cured by reading Scripture.

Predictably, Bush's FDA has been up to some real monkey business thwarting the makers of Plan-B in their quest for over-the-counter approval:

David Muir's report on the "morning-after" pill, or Plan B, on ABC's World News Tonight, included a conservative group's claim that allowing sales of the pill without a prescription would be unsafe, but provided no scientific evidence to support the claim, while omitting the fact that Food and Drug Administration (FDA) staff scientists and outside advisory panels have recommended that the FDA approve allowing over-the-counter sales.

And articles that confuse the whole issue don't help either:

And because Plan B can now be sold over the counter to most women and men 18 or older, he said, most people can get it without a pharmacist.

Excuse me but...the drug has been approved for sale, without a prescription, behind the counter, by pharmacists, to women who can prove they are at least 18 years of age--approval that this injunction allows pharmacists to ignore.

Welcome to Bush's Fascist Theocracy; we're soaking in it.

---

Thanks to my friend, Green Libertarian, who passed this news story along to me. I won't even mention what Ellie passed along. With friends like these, the rage never ends... peace.

TAGS: Plan B, Abortion, Health Care, Birth Control, Access, Reproductive Rights, Women's Rights, Karen Keiser, Medication, Pharmacist Rights