The Great Indecency Hoax, by Frank Rich in the NYT (and oddly, dated November 28) starteed my morning with as fine a belly laugh as any I’ve had of late.
Rich takes a look at the tempest in a teapot over a Monday Night Football skit involving a cross-promo for the hit show Desperate Housewives. I have been only peripherally aware of the ‘controversy’ this week; now that I work with someone who is a committed sports fan, I hear more about this stuff than I would have in the past.
At any rate, it should come as no surprise that said controversy is a pure media construct, and that apparently no-one was actually offended by the skit until two days after the event, when Rush Limbaugh made it into the center of a segment on his show.
Despite this, the piece only heats up about halfway through:
Again as in the Jackson case, we are also asked to believe that pro football is what Pat Buchanan calls “the family entertainment, the family sports show” rather than what it actually is: a Boschian jamboree of bumping-and-grinding cheerleaders, erectile-dysfunction pageantry and, as Don Imus puts it, “wife-beating drug addicts slamming the hell out of each other” on the field.
Which made me shoot coffee out my nose with laughter, since that more or less summarizes my own disinterest in pro sports. Reading it again still brings the funny.
The next paragraph cites the recent bit of top-notch blogsleuthery by Jeff Jarvis which revealed that an earlier incident which prompted a $1.2 m fine against Fox was based on a total of 3 unique complaints, the first time that I’ve seen this bit of data jump the fence from blogistan to greyladyland.
Jarvis is continuing to file FOIAs, too, so expect some more goodies!