After 9/11, we realized that all these silly culture wars, and arguing about rock lyrics... who cares? You know, we, for some reason, remembered what our real problems are.
For a man who purports to have learned of media ethics only this month, Mr. Williams has spent an undue amount of time appearing as a media ethicist on both CNN and the cable news networks of NBC.
I find so much of politics synthetic. And this has nothing to do with ideology, or political party, or anything of the kind.
I grew up in Washington, D.C. But also loving the theater.
I'm always struck by the kids who turn up in New York and LA, and places in between. Chicago. Wanting to do theater, wanting to do independent film. Wanting to break into television or radio.
In that sense, when a Bush or a Gore, or whomever, goes on David Letterman, that's the news, too.
It is kind of tedious after a while, to parse politicians doing the same thing over and over again. The facts change from week to week, but the sort of masquerade doesn't.
Let us be grateful that Janet Jackson did not bare both breasts. On the first anniversary of the Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction that shook the world, it's clear that just one was big enough to wreak havoc.
Like a master Hollywood showman plotting the release schedule of a movie, Mr. Ashcroft always times his productions exquisitely.
Movie attendance this past year has been at all-time records. And VCR, and then the DVD were supposed to kill movies.
Mr. Moore hijacked the title because he knows it elicits fear, and his right-wing radio critics liken him to Goebbels because of his willingness to manipulate facts to whip up an audience accordingly.
Mr. Moore is not aspiring to journalistic objectivity when he stirs Prince Bandar, various bin Ladens, the Carlyle Group and the Bush family into a malevolent conspiracy of grassy-knoll dimensions.
One of the good things about television is that there's such alternatives now to what's often homogenized network entertainment.
Only in an election year ruled by fiction could a sissy who used Daddy's connections to escape Vietnam turn an actual war hero into a girlie-man.
Politicians now are so scripted, they all are. Doesn't matter what their political views. Everyone has a script. Everyone is quaffed to the nine's.
The total box office for all five best-picture nominees on tonight's Oscars is so small that their collective niche in the national cultural marketplace falls somewhere between square dancing and non-Grisham fiction.
There have been at least three other cases in which federal agencies have succeeded in placing fake news reports on television during the Bush presidency. It was a really good tour. It seemed maybe about a week too long.
This is not a great period for the theater. I can't argue that. It's cyclical, too. You know, culture-for instance, the theater is always dying. It's called the fabulous invalid.
When something really comes from the soul, I think it has a truth that you cannot find in politics.
While F.D.R. once told Americans that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, Mr. Ashcroft is delighted to play the part of Fear Itself, an assignment in which he lets his imagination run riot.
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