Culture/Society

Did you realize Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” could be “weaponized” to instigate violence and that Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” was “authoritarian hold music” similar to Adolf Hitler? If not, then you just aren’t listening, man. Washington Post music critic Chris Richards made the front page of the Style section with “And the Bland Played On.” The original online headline to the post was kookier: “…

After introducing a candidate who looks like Marco Rubio but sounds like Bernie Sanders, ABC's Scandal now has its Trump lookalike candidate, a misogynistic billionaire businessman who rants about "freeloading illegals."

ABC is repeating a failed endeavor. Ratings for The Real O’Neals continue to sink, but that won’t stop the network from keeping the pointedly anti-Catholic show alive as long as it can. And we’ve seen this movie (or series) before, back in the 90s when ABC developed, debuted and kept a show called Nothing Sacred on life support over Catholic and Christian objection.

How do you make a raunchy show that features pegging and bestiality as major plot points even more offensive? Have Clinton guest star. No, not the alleged rapist and serial philanderer, Bill Clinton, but the one who stood by him all these years and is now running for president.

On the premiere night of Crowded, a show that depicts life in a multi-generational home, NBC decided that the ‘Pilot’ did not have enough random sex talk between daughters and their mom, parents smoking pot stashed by the daughters in the playroom, and granddad telling his son that “you love your children, you don’t like them.” No, the network went on to run a second show to give audiences a full…

On CBS This Morning on Tuesday, correspondent Chip Reid took notes from YouTube to find out what kids thought about the presidential election. Reid asked fifth graders at a Virginia charter school about the mechanics of the election cycle, insinuating that kids were more civil than the GOP candidates had been behaving. The series of questions focused mostly on "mean" Trump was, but Reid gave the…

In the episode “Falling,” Supergirl’s Cat Grant (Calista Flockhart) needs a replacement for Lucy Lane, who resigned from CatCo during last week’s show. When Kara (Melissa Benoist) tells her she has a list of qualified applicants who are ranked according to the “least annoying,” Cat asked if there were any Republicans. Kara answers, yes – but they're reformed. Cat, a Hillary supporter, is happy…

These days, one of the biggest meta-debates in politics concerns apportioning blame for the staying power of the Donald Trump circus. How much of Trump’s popularity is attributable to, say, the mainstream media? To conservative talk radio? In a Sunday post, The Washington Monthly’s Martin Longman pointed the finger at Republicans and absolved President Obama. Apropos of Trump’s economically…

Dr. John LaPook, chief medical correspondent for CBS Evening News, aired a largely one-sided report on Sunday's 60 Minutes that featured seven advocates for legalized assisted suicide for the terminally-ill. Dr. LaPook hinted at his slant during the introduction to the segment: "We wanted to hear from patients and family members who've experienced it, and are fighting to make it legal nationwide…

I’ve been wary of how ABC’s new suspense drama The Family would play politics from the beginning. The main character Claire Warren (Joan Allen), whose son has mysteriously reappeared after being missing and thought dead for 10 years, is a Republican running for governor in a campaign run by her daughter, Willa. It took until the third episode, “Of Puppies and Monsters,” for them to finally start…

Neal Gabler is an author and cultural critic who may be best known to NewsBusters readers as a longtime panelist on Fox News Watch. On Friday, lefty sites such as BillMoyers.com and Salon ran an article by Gabler in which he argued that for several decades, the mainstream media have greased the skids for movement conservatism and the Republican party. For example, Gabler asserted that after…

Tim Allen (as Mike Baxer) is always good for a conservative political joke on ABC's Last Man Standing. Tonight he took a jab at the failure of Obamacare. 

Friday's CBS Evening News gave a one-sided preview of a euthanasia segment on an upcoming episode of 60 Minutes. The nearly two-minute long segment from Dr. Jon LaPook featured two of the most prominent supporters of euthanasia proponent Brittany Maynard — her husband, Dan Diaz, and the doctor who prescribed the lethal drugs she used to kill herself in November 2014. Scott Pelley noted that Dr.…

It's fair to say that most of us would probably want one last sexual encounter if we knew the world was ending. Kind of sad, really, that we as a species have placed such a high priority on sex. Regardless, it is apparent that NBC's You, Me and the Apocalypse feels as though humanity would simply devolve into one giant orgy if the planet's demise were imminent – even among those who have taken a…