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Jewish World Review
March 31, 2005
/ 20 Adar II, 5765
What to Use on This Column If You — Horrors! — Happen Not to Like It
By
James Lileks
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
All hail Sam Kimery: He's a canny entrepreneur who's come up with a device that prevents propaganda and Karl Rove-hatched talking points from flooding from your TV unabated.
It's called the Fox Blocker. Hook it up to your coaxial cable, and no longer will the grim visage of Bill O'Reilly fill your screen, commanding you to chant "Freedom is slavery" while standing with a small American flag in your fist. If you sign up now, Kimery will also e-mail Fox's advertisers, telling them you've opted out. An e-mail! If you have Fox stock, sell now.
An exceptional idea. No matter how much tinfoil you pack in your beanie, it can't deflect Rupert Murdock's mind-control rays. He's probably working on a signal that reprograms pacemakers so people's hearts beat faster when the Fox anthem swells.
Oh, sure, you could take your TV apart every day and scrape the right-wing residue off the inside of the glass, but who has the time? You could demand that your cable company add a closed-caption feed to Fox, something that says "Lies! Lies! Nothing but lies!" — but they didn't listen when you demanded that they carry C-Span 12, a channel devoted entirely to static shots of hallways in the Dirksen Senate Office Building.
You could reprogram your cable box so it skips right by the Fox News channel — but you lost the manual.
You could just, well, not watch Fox News.
Just kidding! Of course that's not an option. You have to make a stand against media bias.
Good thing you won't be alone. Everyone thinks the media are biased — except most people in the media, oddly enough.
Some on the right believe that New York Times editors get out the preserved head of Karl Marx and use a Ouija board to see what the father of communism wants them to print. Some on the left believe the media lean to the right, because they are profit-making companies who profit from war. That explains all those documentaries you saw after Sept. 11, like "Faster, Rumsfeld! Kill! Kill!" and other such blood-lusty pro-war coverage.
The truth, as ever, is in the middle. Most newsrooms are stuffed to the gunwales with liberals of various intensities; sometimes it shows, sometimes it doesn't. They try to be objective. Granted, sometimes this takes the form of "Let's be objective about the fact that George W. Bush is an idiot," but it could be worse.
In any case, the folks at Fox are overtly center-right, because they say "our troops" instead of "coalition forces," and use eagles and jets in the promos. Oh, the horror. But at least they put up straw men to argue with their hectoring, square-jawed hosts. Who's the Colmes or Geraldo or Greta at CNN?
Nevertheless, the Fox Blocker is a fabulous tool for the easily annoyed. But why stop there? We need the following devices, pronto:
- The New York Times Evaporator. Uses space-based lasers to locate the Times on your front steps, take aim and incinerate it. In the future the technology will be refined so the lasers can simply remove the columnists you do not like, or eliminate bias-laden adjectives from news stories. For the moment, however, the technology can only target areas several yards wide, so advise your paperboy to throw the Times from the street and run like heck.
- The Talking Head Obscurer. Program in the names of your least favorite commentators, and the Obscurer replaces their faces with pixel hash, a picture of a baboon's hindquarters, or — for those fans of the William Kennedy Smith trial who want to revisit the early '90s — a fuzzy-edged blue oval. Soothing white noise replaces the words. Works on everyone except James Carville, whose personality could cut through the hull of an aircraft carrier.
- The MSNBC Blocker. Actually, this was installed on all cable and satellite boxes a few years ago. They're still waiting for someone to notice.
Finally, there's one new technology that truly shows some promise. It's called the Internet. Visit sites whose opinions you like. Bookmark them. Ignore the rest! Remember, on the Internet no one knows you're a dog — so feel free to sniff the same fire hydrant, day after day after day.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor James Lileks is a columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Comment by clicking here.
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© 2005, James Lileks
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