Neo-Con Fox Shows True Colors
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Nobody wants politics to come into play at the Emmys, but if someone has something they want to say that is legal to say on television, than any act of censorship by the networks is precisely that - censorship. What Fox did last night was inject News Corp's and Rupert Murdoch's personal political ideology into an awards show, which is beyond disgusting. What is even worse is that while a number of outlets talked about the censorship, few of them have called on Fox to apologize to the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, Sally Field, or the public.
What you think of her comments couldn't be more irrelevant, you don't censor winners for political considerations. Not in America, not if the freedom to speak without fear is still valued. There is nothing more poisonous to democracy than political censorship.
Now I don't know if this was a local affiliate, or national broadcast problem, but I lost the video feed from the awards show well over a dozen times during the three hour program, along with very regular audio dropouts. This, combined with malfunctioning teleprompters and disgusting political censorship of winner speeches easily makes Fox the worst host of the Emmys ever. This awards show needs to be moved to another network at all costs, before next years show.
Kudos go out to Josh Tyler of Cinemablend for calling out Fox on their dishonerable actions.
When an actress starts to talk politics and you "accidentally" cut away to a camera facing a wall and "accidentally" and simultaneously mute the broadcast's sound, we know what you're doing. Nobody is that stupid. Censorship is bad enough, but when you try to hide it by faking technical glitches you're not just a stupid bunch of weak-kneed FCC lackies, you're evil. George Orwell evil. We see through you. Maybe the Emmy telecast is new to this whole America thing, but hey, free speech? Where'd that go? If it's just a curse word you're censoring, how about using an old fashioned bleep? It's worked for decades. Use it. Love it. Don't leave us looking at the wall and wondering if we're living in a "V for Vendetta" graphic novel.
On other hand, Tyler missed the deal with CurrentTV by a mile.
If you're television, of course you don't want to promote You Tube. But you also don't need to piss off their users by promoting some Al Gore fueled competitor no one has ever heard of or uses by giving it a fake, made-up, meaningless award.
The award given to Gore and Current were of one of the set given out by a panel, rather than by Academy member vote. These are indeed mostly pointless, but only because they don't represent the thoughts of Academy members, not because the award itself was made up or pointless. Current went on the air just six months after YouTube was created, so it's perfectly within reason to say that they were born competitors to a degree. In another light though, Current has nothing to do with YouTube. Current is a cable TV channel, not an Internet site. Rather than having videos seen by a couple of hundred thousand people, videos show on Current get seen by millions.
Given how unprofitable YouTube is and the question over its legality (its content is overwhelmingly illegal) you could easily argue that Current has been more successful than YouTube has.
Either way, Current promotes quality user-created content and broadcasts it to millions. YouTube's most popular content is either funny, or illegal. Which of the two deserve an award? It ain't YouTube.
One of my first and leading criticisms of the awards show before Fox censored Sally Field for political reasons was how long it took to give out the actual awards during the beginning. They had only given out four awards in first half hour, and were only giving them out at a rate of 2 per segment. While they did eventually speed things up, this should could have easily been two hours long, rather than running over at 3+, had they simply maintained a reasonable pace throughout the entire broadcast.
Here are some links from around the Internets, all related to the 2007 Emmy Awards.
Review: 59th Primetime Emmy Awards (The Hollywood Reporter), 2007 Emmys: Sopranos and 30 Rock Win Top Drama and Comedy Awards (IGN), HBO, NBC and ABC lead Emmys (Reuters), 4 Things Emmy Can Teach Oscar (Cinemablend), Review: Emmys get the silent treatment (Associated Press), Sally Field Shrugs Off Bleepin' Emmy Controversy (Matt Mitovich [TV Guide]).
A number of people supported Sally Field in the comments on Matt's blog entry, with none that I saw with a brief glance supporting Fox's censorship. **Why do you hate American, Fox?
**For most of the time between 2001 and 2006, Republicans often intimated and many openly said that anyone who didn't support their war agenda did not support and hated American. I couldn't think of a more fitting time to turn the tables on Fox when they so openly attack the freedoms this country was founded on. My own rant on this from last night can be read at "2007 Emmy Award Winners". The full list of winners is available on the Academy website.
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