Quote of the Day

"The doctors are not gonna tell you both sides of the issue... they're told by the pharmaceutical industry, which makes billions of dollars, that it's completely safe. The efficacy of these shots have not been proven. And the toxicity of these things -- we're having more and more side effects. We're having more and more autism."

-- Rob Schneider on the supposed link between vaccinations and autism

So there you have it: every reputable doctor and researcher in the civilized world or -- the woman on the new cover of Playboy and Deuce Bigalow.

I realized I've been recycling a lot lately, but we've had an influx of new readers around here recently and, what with the holiday and all, I'm all about cheap and easy content.

So there's this:

"Autism Speaks (and Speaks, and Speaks)" (Originally Published, 5.6.09)

Good news for people who think that posing nude in Playboy and hosting a crappy MTV game show automatically comes with its own PhD in neuroscience: Jenny McCarthy will soon have a daily platform from which to berate the medical community for not taking her advice on treating autism.

Unless you're lucky enough to have mercifully been born deaf, you're probably well aware of Jenny's delightful one-dingbat crusade to find someone or something to blame for her 5-year-old son's autism. For the past couple of years, she's jumped in front of pretty much every television camera and microphone in the continental United States to stir up unnecessary controversy over certain childhood vaccinations by proclaiming her belief that there's a link between them and autism and shouting down anyone who has the gall to doubt her credentials (or, in the case of Denis Leary, to doubt the veracity of the abundance of recent autism diagnoses in this country in the first place). Because, really -- why trust those doctors and their medical degrees when you can listen to Jim Carrey's girlfriend?

There's little as obnoxious in the pop cultural sphere as the celebrity who declares him or herself the all-knowing, unrelenting voice of experience on a particular subject simply because it happened to have touched his or her life in some way. For every one Michael J. Fox, who's fought Parkinson's with staggering humility and a dignified focus that's truly benefited others, there are ten Jenny McCarthys -- who write books on how gross it is that white stuff sometimes comes out of your vagina during pregnancy.

Actually I take it back; there is one thing more obnoxious: someone who enables that person.

In this case, the one foisting Jenny's show on an innocent public -- the one whose personal largess pretty much guarantees that Jenny McCarthy will be the next big thing in daytime television -- is none other than the event horizon of all human experience: Oprah. No one absorbs, assimilates, then repackages under her own mantle the breadth of existence that Oprah does; if something hasn't happened to her -- it just hasn't happened. Who the hell knows, maybe Oprah assumes that being tangentially associated with someone whose child is autistic will qualify her as an expert on yet another subject currently capturing the public's imagination. She had to have some way to stick her greedy little fingers in the autism pie, seeing as how she won't be getting her own kid, autistic or otherwise, at any point short of chloroforming one at her school in South Africa and sneaking him or her through customs in a giant box marked "make-up."

The real problem is that celebrities of the Oprah and Jenny McCarthy stripe are so used to being deferred to on just about every issue by a sycophantic media that they really have come to arrogantly believe that they're qualified to offer an informed opinion on anything they've Googled once or twice or read an article on while sitting in First Class. When we're talking about, say, Oprah's favorite funnel cake recipe or Jenny's thoughts on the feel of silicone versus saline breast implants -- no harm, no foul. But when they begin playing doctor -- when Oprah hypes the latest trendy Hollywood colon cleanse or Jenny recommends that parents not inoculate their children or touts Scientology-esque "cures" for complex diseases -- that's when things get dangerous.

Nothing Jenny McCarthy has suggested about the link between vaccinations and autism has been proven -- far from it. But Jenny isn't letting that stop her campaign of ignorance. She has her convictions as a mother and her moral certitude as a celebrity.

And soon, she'll have a bigger audience than she's ever had before.

Listening Post

All hail new music from Blur -- available beginning today in the stateside iTunes store.

Here's Under the Westway.

State of Disgrace

Okay, anybody wanna step up and defend these assholes?

CNN: Disturbing E-Mails May Spell More Trouble for Penn State/7.2.12

A related article in the Christian Science Monitor sums up the details:

"Citing email exchanges between senior Penn State officials in 2001, CNN reports an apparent effort to go slowly on what a graduate assistant said he had seen: Sandusky sexually assaulting a boy in the team locker room shower.

The emails between former university president Graham Spanier, athletic director Tim Curley, and vice president Gary Schultz, at first suggested contacting the state Department of Welfare, which investigates suspected child abuse.

But a day later, the officials agreed that a more 'humane and a reasonable way to proceed' would be to approach Sandusky (referred to not by name, but as 'the person') with the allegation but not involve state authorities.

'The only downside for us is if message isn't heard and acted upon and we then become vulnerable for not having reported it, but that can be assessed down the road,' one email said, according to CNN.

Coach Paterno (who was fired for 'failure of leadership' because of the sex scandal and died in January) had said that he reported graduate assistant Mike McQueary’s information to the athletic director, believing that was his only obligation in the case.

But the timing of the officials’ change in plans alluded to in the emails – coming after athletic director Curley had discussed the reported shower incident with Paterno – raises questions about whether the coach was more involved than he said in the decision to proceed in a more 'humane and a reasonable way.'

The fact is, the incident back in 2001 was not acted upon in a way that might have prevented subsequent sexual abuse by Sandusky over the next decade. Nor was there ever an attempt to identify the boy seen in the shower by McQueary, or to check on that boy’s well-being."

I realize that some will see this as an overreaction and the Penn State faithful will consider it outright blasphemy, but the school's football program should probably face the death penalty. While it can be argued that no NCAA bylaws were officially broken, the breakdown in institutional control -- particularly one that arose out of an effort to protect the football program and the school itself -- and the unmitigated tragedy that was allowed to spring from it constitutes a massive violation of the spirit of the rules put in place by the NCAA. There were acts undertaken and not undertaken by almost everyone who knew about what was going on with Sandusky that may not be illegal in the traditional sense, but that doesn't make the attempted cover-up, the gross negligence, the willingness to keep it from those it needed to be relayed to despicably unethical and flat-out wrong.

Make no mistake: The NCAA almost certainly won't kill Penn State football -- but it would be justified if it did.

Back when this story broke last year, I had quite a bit to say about it. What follows was the most comprehensive piece.

"Say It Ain't So, Joe" (Originally Published, 11.9.11)

I was going to avoid this subject simply because there's an odd sort of conflict of interest at play for me -- namely, all of my ex's siblings went to this particular school and their rabid allegiance to it was the subject of quite a bit of back-and-forth between us during my time with their sister. I've never been someone who aligns myself with any group, let alone vigorously, and so I never could understand the almost cult-like devotion and blood-brotherhood ethos with fellow alumni that an alma-mater could inspire. It just didn't make a bit of sense to me and so I often looked at the traditional machinations and proclamations of unwavering faith that went along with it probably much the same way that Mark and Ollie looked at the Mek tribe when they made the decision to live with it and document its alien ways. Although I was probably more of a dick than those guys were -- I admit that.

Bottom line, though: My adopted brothers and sister are truly great people and I certainly wouldn't want to insult them, but strangely that very special brand of steadfast fealty is part of the reason I want to at least throw out a minor comment or two on the child sex abuse scandal at Penn State that just ended the almost mythical career of the school's football coach, Joe Paterno. I won't run down the details of the scandal that has inarguably brought shame to what was going to be the hallowed legacy of Paterno and has consumed the Penn State athletics program from the inside out; those details are sickening, made even more so when you consider that it appears there were those within the program -- Paterno included -- who at least had some idea what was going on with defensive coach Jerry Sandusky and yet didn't lift a finger to truly put a stop to it. Obviously, Paterno isn't charged with a crime and I believe him when he expresses extraordinary remorse for what happened, as well as what he did and didn't do about it. Paterno's cultivated a reputation for being a stand-up guy, so it really is unfortunate that this is the way he's going to go out.

The issue I have, again, is with the view by those who either went to Penn State or just count themselves among the school's many fans that it's an almost infallible institution. Case in point: An article written for USA Today College by a Penn State alum named Emily Grier in which she goes to nearly super-human lengths to express sympathy for the victims of the alleged abuse while defending Penn State as an establishment -- a way of life, even -- that remains largely above reproach. One which has earned the devotion it inspires through a lifetime of good deeds that simply can't be sullied by the actions of a few bad apples.

Except that this runs much deeper than that.

True, at worst it would appear as if the gruesome crimes allegedly perpetrated by Sandusky were indirectly enabled by a handful of people, but those people are undeniably the power structure of Penn State -- not necessarily the heart of the school but certainly the ones who hold the hearts, minds and loyalty of the student body and beyond. Make no mistake, if a systemic cover-up of any kind took place that allowed Jerry Sandusky to rape children, that's not a couple of bad apples -- that's a Catholic Church-level crime. And much like followers of the Catholic Church, the Penn State nation will have to learn to reconcile the fact that the view of their institution has been irreparably tarnished, and with excellent reason. Of course the school has done much good throughout its history and that shouldn't be disregarded, but it can be argued that the church has as well, and yet that allowed it no slack when the details of the behavior of a relative few within its ranks began to come to light. In fact, the presentation of itself as a benign and charitable entity is exactly why its sins are so devastating. Why they feel like such a betrayal to so many.

Joe Paterno is Penn State. He's the face of the school -- its deity. And when you hold someone or something up to idol worship, you blind yourself to the possibility that that person or institution is capable of terrible things. The same as any of us is.

It bothers me because it makes me feel like I was always right in saying that no one deserves sanctification -- no one has earned it and no one, no matter how much you believe in him or her, is beyond the potential to let you down. I wish someone would prove me wrong about this, but that never seems to happen. The good almost always succumb. Evil generally triumphs. Even gods fall. And when they do, it devastates those who worshiped them -- leaving everything they believed in in tatters and leaving them desperate for answers.

Coop Comes Out

As promised, my brand new piece for the Daily Banter deals with Anderson Cooper's decision to finally come out of the closet.

Here's the opening shot:

"A little background on the subject at hand: Back during the 2004 presidential race, at the Democratic National Convention, Anderson Cooper was doing an interview with hip-hop mogul and political dilettante Diddy at a time when I happened to be in the CNN control room in Atlanta. The live one-on-one was wrapping up, when Diddy offered Anderson one of the ridiculous 'Vote or Die' t-shirts he had been pimping as part of his high-profile but incomprehensibly messaged get-out-the-vote campaign. 'Here, take one for yourself,' Diddy said, throwing a t-shirt in Anderson’s direction. 'No, I really can’t accept it,' Anderson returned, understanding that it wasn’t jounalistically responsible to collect political swag, certainly not while on the job. Diddy’s response: 'No, man, then give it to your girlfriend...'"

Read the Rest Here

Quote of the Day

"The fact is, I'm gay. Always have been, always will be, and I couldn’t be any more happy, comfortable with myself, and proud."

-- Anderson Cooper, officially confirming the worst kept secret in television news

He made this statement in an e-mail to Andrew Sullivan, one he allowed Sullivan to reprint publicly. Bottom line: Good for Coop. I always respected his decision to keep his private life private and I respect his decision to come out even more.

More on this a little later in the Daily Banter.

Listening Post

A damn cool cover for the BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge -- here's My Chemical Romance doing Pulp's Common People.

Happy holiday week, kids.

Quote of the Day

"We gave her a year to prove herself, and ultimately we came to the conclusion that she had played at the highest level she could. When you’re in the major leagues of our profession, you’ve got to continue to be at peak performance in order to stay there."

-- NBC News President Steve Capus on the network's decision to push Ann Curry out of the Today show after fifteen years, with less than a year on the anchor desk

Every time I think NBC in general and Capus in particular can no longer surprise me with their almost sociopathic incompetence and lack of anything approaching journalistic or business ethics, they find new depths to the proverbial barrel. It's bad enough to promote someone to a position you had to know she wasn't right for -- given that she'd been on your staff for fourteen years -- understanding that you'd be willing to embarrass yourself by letting her go quickly if she didn't in fact measure up. But to then turn around and publicly trash that person when she remains an employee within your company -- and make no mistake, that's exactly what Capus is doing here -- shows an utter lack of class and takes an astonishing amount of management hubris. I can't think of a time when it was considered acceptable, to say nothing of civilized, for an executive within a company to insult one of his or her loyal employees and to officially blame the victim when a crappy management decision blows up in everyone's face.

But we've seen this before from the near-magnificent assholes at NBC. We watched both Jeff Zucker and Dick Ebersol have the unmitigated gall to privately and publicly beat up on Conan O'Brien and blame him for the situation which led to his being ousted from The Tonight Show. And as for Capus, he was behind a journalistic decision so immoral, reprehensible and obscene that it marks an untouched low-point in network news ethics: the decision to air the final videotaped manifesto of Virginia Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho.

That incident inspired one of the most viciously indignant screeds to ever appear on this site. And it's why almost nothing NBC does, no matter how stupid, irresponsible or just plain wrong, can truly shock me anymore.

"The Tapes of Wrath" (Originally Published, 4.20.07)

"The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage."

-- Chuck Palahniuk

I want my soul back.

Over the years, the television news business has made me feel many ways -- exhilarated, proud, honored, embarrassed, enlightened, trivial, angry, frustrated, even ashamed on more than one occasion. It has never, however, made me feel dirty -- until now.

This overwhelming need that I have at the moment to crawl into a shower and desperately attempt to rinse the corruption and sickness off of my skin stems from one simple fact: the images that are currently plastered all over every television network and newspaper in America -- the photos and homemade video of Virginia Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho -- should never have seen the light of day. Neither you, nor I, nor the families of the victims, nor anyone aside from FBI investigators should have ever laid eyes on any of it.

I'm well aware that there are some who would consider this a dereliction of duty on my part, an abandonment of my unspoken vow to dispassionately satisfy the public's insatiable right to know, no matter the cost or consequence.

You know something? I couldn't fucking care less.

On Wednesday afternoon, NBC News made a decision that, if there's any justice in the universe whatsoever, will be remembered as the singular event that obliterated its once-hallowed reputation, got its smug, hypocritical prick of a president Steve Capus deported to a deserted island and brought 30 Rock crashing to the ground.

Through a thought process that I can't even begin to comprehend, nor would I even wish to be able to, NBC chose to give a final posthumous forum to the psychotic, self-obsessed and thoroughly delusional kid who took thirty-two innocent lives out of some ridiculously inflated sense of aggrievement for a supposed lifetime of persecution. The network's news executives put prurience ahead of prudence and in doing so rubbed the faces of the victims' families into the very dirt used to bury their loved ones; they did it by seeing to it that everywhere those families turned, they would stare into the same cold eyes that their terrified sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, husbands and wives saw the instant before they died.

Understand, as a veteran of this business I've always been of the opinion that news must be taken at face value, that the potential fallout, positive or negative, from running a legitimate story should rarely, if ever, be taken into account when deciding whether or not to go to air with that story. I've sat in meeting after meeting in which the news value of an item was weighed against its potential impact. I've listened to executive after executive rationalize the choice to run a questionable news item in the hope of hiding from others and possibly even themselves the tawdriness of their true motives. I've done it myself on more than one occasion.

I can tell you, without fear of contradiction, that this is exactly what Capus and company did on Wednesday when presented with a story, the spectacular sensationalism of which was matched only by its complete lack of any real value to the public. NBC's news department heads received a gift from the gods, via the mail, and they'd be damned if they weren't going to run with it no matter what kind of moral somersaults they might have to perform to justify the decision.

So run with it they did, splashing Seung-Hui Cho's contorted face and idiotic ramblings across the airwaves with all the subtlety of gang-bang porn.

As if on cue from the network's PR department, Steve Capus himself took to NBC's airwaves soon after to assure America that he had personally wrestled long and hard with the leviathan ethical dilemma presented by such a story before valiantly pinning his conscience to the mat and forcing it to tap out. The hysterical irony was that it marked Capus's second such appearance on one of his own networks' news programs in two weeks: the last time was when he bombastically asserted the moral authority of himself and his network by dropping Don Imus, who had merely insulted, rather than gunned down a group of college students.

Let me repeat that in simpler terms: Make a cruel comment about a bunch of kids and you're not worthy to have a forum on NBC; stalk through the halls shooting kids in cold blood and NBC will give you all the time you'd like to speak your mind.

No matter the bullshit ethical loopholes Capus continues to try to squeeze through, one need only look at the video itself for NBC's true motivation to become crystal clear. There, burned into the top left-hand corner of every frame of tape and every still image of Cho posing with his weapons of choice is the NBC News logo, complete with peacock. It's been put there as an almost juvenile -- given the subject matter -- assertion of ownership, a figurative tongue protruding in the direction of every news organization that NBC knew would fair-use the material.

It's the best and easiest form of promotion imaginable, promotion the network hopes will turn into ratings which will turn into dollars for NBC Universal shareholders and a big bonus for Capus.

And lest there be any lingering doubt that the network knew from the beginning that it was stepping over the line, Brian Williams basically admitted as much during a conversation with imbecilic talking-head Chris Matthews on MSNBC Wednesday night, saying that he was well aware that by airing even a portion of Cho's manifesto, NBC was bestowing upon the killer the martyrdom he had hoped to achieve. The reason he had killed -- the reason he had mailed the tape to a television network to begin with -- was because he wanted to be heard loud and clear and NBC was more than happy to oblige him that opportunity.

Satisfying the motives of a murderer should've been reason enough for NBC to refuse to air such an obscenely stupid diatribe. The only argument that can ever be made -- the one mitigating factor -- in favor of giving a killer what he wants is the threat of further violence, and Cho wasn't the Zodiac; he had already seen to it that he would never kill again.

The morning after the network made its contemptibly immoral decision -- one which opened the floodgates for every other news organization in the world to follow suit, as the genie was out of the bottle by that point -- the families of two of the shooting victims canceled their scheduled appearances on the Today show, citing a very understandable level of hurt and bitter outrage. Whether that was enough to hammer home the culpability of the network in the continued emotional torture of these poor people, who knows. It would be nice to believe, though, that behind the walls of 30 Rock and its bastard stepchild MSNBC -- the nicest warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey -- someone somewhere was considering the throwing of himself upon a sword for the unforgivable crime of dishonoring what's always been a strictly above-the-board news operation.

I knew none of the victims personally and yet I grieve for them. As someone who's always allowed myself the comfort of detached analysis, and an occasional moral relativism which is the natural by-product of it, I don't often see subjects in terms of absolutes. Things are rarely black or white, right or wrong, good or evil; there's typically an abundance of gray area in between which demands to be taken into account.

Not this time.

I feel for the families of the victims. I feel for the victims themselves, all of whom were guilty of nothing more than waking up and going to class on an otherwise typical Monday morning. I imagine their terror when confronted with their cold and methodical executioner. I place the life of Max Turner against the life of Seung-Hui Cho -- what he chose to become -- and it's not even worthy of comparison; it's innocence versus guilt, life versus death. Not one of those thirty-two people deserved to die, certainly not at the whim of a craven fucking coward who needed to lock them all in and mercilessly gun them down to achieve whatever narcissistic sense of authority he felt life was denying him. Anyone who demands respect from behind a gun is spineless to begin with; a person who demands it from an unarmed kid who's cowering on the floor in front of him, begging for his or her life -- just before shooting that terrified kid three times -- is a worthless piece of shit.

Make no mistake: I would wink at the devil and gladly accept a lifetime in hell just for the sheer, unadulterated joy of having been able to take Seung-Hui Cho's skull and smash it against the concrete floor until there was nothing left of it.

Someone should've put a fucking bullet in that kid before he ever had the chance to destroy so many innocent lives.

I don't care what his twisted reasoning was or who had beat him up back in high school, there's simply no excuse for what he did.

Just like there's no excuse for complicity in the elevation of his act to the martrydom he had hoped it would be seen as by the next sociopathic kid with a gun and a grudge.

Believe me, that kid's already out there somewhere -- and he's thinking that he can kill thirty-three.