New Ph.D Eric
Alterman has a new gig and a new
weekly column at the
Center for American Progress (which has so many goodies for progressives that it earned an immediate bookmark) along with his daily
Altercation at MSNBC. His CAP column goes up on Thursdays, and today he hits the nail right on the head in discussing CBS's decision to pull the Reagan mini-series:
Meanwhile, CBS chairman Leslie Moonves insisted that he had made the decision entirely on matters of quality, the tidal wave of right-wing pressure it was facing. (This is, recall, the network that produces "The Real Beverly Hillbillies.") And while liberals and many artists are understandably angry about the blow struck against free expression by the very people allegedly pledged to defend it, in fact, the CBS has done the world a favor by demonstrating the power of the right-wing pressure machine to get what it wants from even the most powerful of entertainment conglomerates.
**snip**
The successful effort to intimidate CBS is about politics; nothing more, nothing less. Matt Bivens reports on The Nation Web site about the efforts of Republican activist, Grover Norquist and the Reagan Legacy Project, which is well along toward its stated goal of having at least one public building or street or structure named after Reagan in each of America's 3,067 counties. That's on top of the push to have Reagan's face put on the ten dollar bill (instead of Alexander Hamilton), and the drives to put a Reagan monument on the Washington Mall (an honor so far reserved only for Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt) and to carve Reagan's head onto Mount Rushmore. And of course there's already a Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington and the twin-nuclear-reactor powered USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier, which was christened this summer ... oh, there's also the commemorative Reagan stamp issued by, of all places, the island of Grenada (which also has the Ronald Reagan Scholarship Fund to send students to the United States for study) ... and the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll.
CBS was staring at a ratings gold mine with "The Reagans" given the controversy it managed to produce. Imagine a campaign that began, "Watch the movie that powerful forces don't want you to see!" Instead, it bowed to something in America that turns out to be even more powerful than the promise of a single-night's killing; a well-organized movement of pressure groups willing to threaten its advertising base. Liberals should take heed. As a historian with a newly-minted Ph.D., I am in favor of historical accuracy in all matters. But as a student of the tactics of right-wing media manipulation, I know there is only one way to fight such fire.
Sunshine is the best disinfectant for this kind of crap. Think about the implications of this kind of power in an election year.