On PBS's Web site today, ombudsman Michael Getler writes of complaints over an incident during last Sunday's pledge drive. He describes the cheap shot taken by actor Mike Farrell against vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin:
According to Joseph Campbell, vice president of fundraising programs, here's what happened:
On The Situation Room today, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer made a surprising admission to, of all people, real estate entrepreneur Donald Trump:
On CNN's American Morning today, White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux reported on Barack Obama's campaigning in Virginia. Afterwards, anchor Kiran Chetry had a question:
CHETRY: All right. And Suzanne, what's on tap for the campaign today? And please tell me it's not lipstick again.
MALVEAUX: Let's hope not. He's going to be in Norfolk, Virginia. That is in southeast Virginia, and it's home to the world's largest Naval base. It's one of the most competitive areas that the Democrats and Republicans are fighting over. It's a critical piece of property, piece of land there with folks in Virginia, and they want those voters.
Why is it that conservative characters on prime time television, what few of them there are, almost always end up "evolving" into fuzzy liberals? "Entertainment Weekly" columnist Mark Harris asked that very question in the current issue of the media magazine [Emphasis added]:
Tonight (Sunday, May 14 at 8pm EDT/PDT, 7pm CDT/MDT) NBC will air the final episode of The West Wing. Since its debut in September of 1999 when "President Josiah Bartlet," played by Martin Sheen, told some cartoon-ish conservative religious leaders to "get your fat asses out of my White House" (an episode NBC will re-air before the final episode), the prime time drama regularly advocated liberal policies and showcased liberal causes.When NBC announced in January that it was canceling the political drama after seven seasons, it said the final episode in May would be accompanied by a retrospective on the series' history.
A Hollywood star from Wisconsin is apparently less embarrassed by Canada than by the United States. On Friday night's Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, actor Bradley Whitford, who plays “Josh Lyman” on NBC's The West Wing, related how he “just had a friend who went to Europe and I gave her a Canadian flag to put on her bag.” Whitford declared that the U.S. policy in Iraq “has desecrated” the American flag since we are “treating the rest of the world with contempt, dropping bombs on people who don't need bombs dropped on them” and “killing civilians...based on an assumption that an Iraqi life is worth less than ours. It's obscene." Earlier, Whitford contended: "There's no military, conventional military solution to terrorism. If there were, Israel would be the safest country in the world.” (But if Israel didn't use their military, would Israel still exist?) Turning his anger on the Bush administration, the actor who on The West Wing plays the Chief-of-Staff to “Democratic President-elect Matt Santos,” charged: “I think the whole approach by these bungling, violent, violence-addicted people in this administration, it's like the Polish joke: You lose your ring in the dark and so you look for it where there's light, where you know how to do it."
It should surprise no one that the Democrat won the fictional presidential race on "The West Wing," which is set to be cancelled. But the show's writers insist it has nothing to do with the fact that none of them is Republican.
Reports the New York Times:
At the Huffington Post yesterday, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell stated that President Bush, who is rumored to watch reruns of the television program O’Donnell is the executive producer for, should be watching recent episodes of NBC's “The West Wing” to learn how to deal with problems in his own
<img vspace="0" hspace="0" border="0" align="right" src="/media/2005-10-30-NBCWWGarofalo.jpg" />Hollywood's fantasy that Republicans could sweep the nation if they only put up a "pro-choice" candidate animated last Sunday's episode -- and Janeane Garofalo got in a blast at conservatives. NBC is promising an "unprecedented <i>West Wing</i> event" in tonight’s sweeps stunt of a live debate between liberal presidential candidate "Matt Santos," played by Jimmy Smits, and the anti-religious right Republican "Arnie Vinick," played by Alan Alda. Last Sunday, Vinick was angered by an independent ad which attacked Santos for opposing parental notification and a ban on partial-birth abortions, policies the otherwise pro-choice Vinick backs: "Who told them to drag abortion into my campaign?" Demanding the ad be pulled, Vinick asserted: "Do you realize how many states my pro-choice position puts on the table?" Later, Santos remarked: "Vinick's appeal is that he's a different kind of Republican, moderate, reasonable, pro-choice." <br /><br />In one scene on the October 30 episode, Santos' media chief, "Louise Thornton," played by Janeane Garofalo, sounded just like the real-life Garofalo when she argued that the campaign must go negative against Vinick, and she cited the good being done by a Senator she got elected by going negative against his opponent: "I'm proud that he votes against every reckless Republican tax cut. We're the blue team and there's a real war going on. Josh, do you want the right wing to get their judges?"<br /><br />Friday night on MSNBC’s <i>Scarborough Country</i>, <i>West Wing</i> star Bradley Whitford trashed Bush as “a radical right-wing President who now seems to be incompetent.” A Zogby International poll of <i>West Wing</i> viewers found they tilt to the left, with 59 percent saying they’d vote for Democrat Smits/Santos compared to just 29 percent for Alda/Vinick, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/04/AR200511... de Moraes reported in Saturday’s <i>Washington Post</i></a>. But the viewers recognize the show’s bias: “A full 77 percent of respondents said <i>The West Wing</i> has a liberal bias.”<br /><br />
In a blog offering at “The Huffington Post,” MSNBC’s senior political analyst Lawrence O’Donnell shared some rather scathing opinions of White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove yesterday, and made it clear that it would have been better for the president an
<img vspace="0" hspace="0" border="0" align="right" src="/media/2005-10-14-HBORealTime.jpg" />On this past weekend's<i> <a href="http://www.hbo.com/billmaher/">Real Time with Bill Maher</a></i> on HBO, comedian Bill Maher pointed to the liberal scriptwriters of NBC's <i>West Wing</i> for political guidance. Maher touted how “Alan Alda plays a Republican Senator who tells the Christian Right to go screw.” Maher yearned: “Why can't we have that in real life?” Last Tuesday (October 11) on MSNBC's <i>Hardball</i>, the <i>Chicago Tribune</i>'s Jim Warren had also held up how the Alda character "confronts a top Christian Right official who insists on a public pledge that Alan Alda, if elected President, will only pick anti-abortion judges to the federal court. And Alan Alda, seeing the world as much more complicated, declines to do that." Maher proceeded to wonder: “Why can't we have a real Alan Alda character who says to the Christian Right what the Democrats basically say to the black people, which is, 'you know what? Where else are you going to go?'" <br /><br />Full transcripts of Maher's comments, the Alan Alda character's lines on the October 9 episode of <i>The West Wing</i> and links to previous NewsBusters items on <i>The West Wing</i>, follow.<br /><br />