The Politically Correct Boycott Corp is on the march again!  If the show doesn’t fit within your political agenda, then just boycott it and try to “shut up dissent.”  According to the Washington Post, around two hundred companies are now boycotting Glenn Beck.

When a journalist who gets great ratings is being attacked for doing what he does (as in the case of Glenn Beck) by those who scream about Freedom of Speech and high journalism, it’s like they have an “I’m with Stupid” tattoo punched into their foreheads.  Aren’t progressives the same people who think it is okay to decry every alleged “impropriety” by conservatives while hiding behind the guise of “free speech” for themselves? Is it somehow less appropriate for Glenn Beck to espouse his opinions?  Why?  Because he might be onto something, and his ratings are high?

Newsflash!  Beck is but a reflection of an entire mass of people who believe what he has the platform to say!  They aren’t going away. In fact, they are growing in spades!

Fox News executives know that if they let advertisers bully them into booting Beck, he will get another job, and advertisers will next be pressured to abandon O’Reilly or Hannity to try to censor them. Why would they make such a self-defeating, bad business decision? (more…)

While audiences in America flock to the escapist eye candy known as Avatar, it’s sobering to realize that in the real world, far away from James Cameron’s utopian dreamscape and the cozy cocoons of our multiplex theaters, another film’s message of defiance is helping to fuel revolution against a repressive regime.

The Stoning of Soraya M., from writer-director Cyrus Nowrasteh and Mpower Pictures, tells the true story of a woman in a remote Iranian village in the wake of the fundamentalist revolution of 1979, who is falsely accused of adultery and then stoned to death by a mob desperate to cleanse themselves of this rumored affront to their collective honor and to their religion. It’s not only a gripping story in its own right, but it also focuses a harsh spotlight on the shocking reality that stoning still exists in the Iranian penal code. The movie has been reviewed and written about manytimes on Big Hollywood, as well as listed among the site’s 10 best movies of 2009. (Look for it on DVD from Lion’s Gate in March) (more…)

For years, the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich have played the same journalistic card trick:  Take the hot button issue of the week, cross it with the latest pop culture reference and – voila! – Times readers are treated to columns that give the appearance of having some kind of deep-seated cultural insight.

The problem, however, is that their “insights” won’t stand up to any kind of serious analysis, and quickly reveal themselves to be shallow, glib, sophomoric, and perhaps worst of all, predictable.

(Several weeks ago, for example, Rich struggled to make the claim that the George Clooney film Up in the Air is the Grapes of Wrath for our times – which sounds pretty good, until one thinks about it for a moment:  The film is about a guy who travels the country racking up frequent flier miles as he fires people; Steinbeck’s masterpiece is about the struggles of the Joads as they’ve lost their farm and their livelihoods, and set out for California, penniless.  But such is what passes for insight at the Times – where the upper westsider who’s been forced to fire a maid is seen as the tragic victim in need of sympathy, rather than the out-of-work maid.) (more…)