Media in Trouble: All the news thats UNfit to print!: BRILLIANT!... What else have you got!

"The information of the people at large can alone make them safe, as they are the sole depositary of our political and religious freedom." --Thomas Jefferson 1810

Friday, April 01, 2005

BRILLIANT!... What else have you got!

FactCheck.org has a new fact they are checking.

They highlight a movie clip glorifying the filibuster that People for the American Way are using in a commercial.

So the headline of Fact Check's piece is "A Fictional View of the Filibuster." Here is the lede:
A $5-million TV ad campaign by People for the American Way portrays the Senate filibuster as a noble tool of American democracy. The ad uses footage from Frank Capra's classic 1939 movie "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" - a famous scene in which the hero, played by James Stewart, engages in a 23-hour filibuster to prevent his expulsion from the US Senate on trumped-up corruption charges.

Real-life filibusters are another matter, however. They can be used for good or evil. In fact, segregationist Southern senators used filibusters to preserve the poll tax and block civil rights and anti-lynching legislation for generations. Among the real-life practitioners were the late Senators Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi.


So FactCheckin portraying only the "evil" use of the filibuster, calls PFAW on their sneaky use of a fictional character in a fictional movie to portray a fictional filibuster.

Thank you for clearing that up factcheck. How about you get to work on that Santa Claus guy, I have a feeling he is real but I am not sure.

|