Pretty much like this.

By Alex Wukman

Two Weeks Ago:

“Where’d you get your information,” snarls the tanned, blonde late-20s guy with the popped collar polo shirt, cargo shorts and flip flops. We’re at Liberty Station drinking and talking politics, well I’m drinking and he was talking politics to his friends until I interrupted by telling him “Hitler wasn’t a Marxist, Leninist or a Socialist. He was a right wing fascist.” I tell him I got it from a history and government class I took in college.

“Pshaw,” let’s call him Broseph says. “University. More like liberal indoctrination factory.” He swivels in his bar stool to get a better look at me; all I can think is how I really want a cigarette right now, if only so I have something to do with my hands and a reason not to look at his maniacally grinning eyes. “Let me guess they read it to you from a book, written by other liberals?’

“I really don’t know if the author was a liberal and I think it’s unfair to assume…” I try to say before he cuts me off dismissively with a wave of his hand. “Dude, everyone knows most textbooks were written by liberals. Come talk to me when you get some real and unbiased information, bro.” I try to ask him where I might find some real and unbiased information but he has already turned back to his friends who are also tanned and blonde. I sit there nursing my beer while Broseph and his friends laugh and order another round of mantinis.

Real and unbiased information?

Today:

I decide to spend the next two weeks locked in a room with nothing but “real and unbiased” information, only coming out to get drunk and do podcasts. Since facts and reality both have a well-known liberal bias I decided to be objective and get my information only from Snapple caps and Conservapedia; places where facts and reality don’t matter. Then I  learned that Snapple is an iced tea brewed by hippies and distributed by a massive, faceless corporation. Simply too liberal for me. So I decided to look at World News Daily. I’ll attempt to recreate the things I learned by going into the No Fact Zone. The first thing I learned is that Conservatives appear to have a different view of popular media and seem obsessed with finding things to reinforce their own world view, so much that some of the most popular articles on Conservapedia are “The best or greatest conservative___”

Music

I don’t know If I’m deviating from my experiment to get “real and unbiased information” by using logic; but I am going to attempt to do so here.  If something is liked by liberals, or is interpreted as pushing a liberal point of view, then the creator must be liberal. Therefore: if something is liked by conservatives, or pushes a conservative point of view, then ip so facto (wait, is Latin liberal?) the creator must be conservative.  So, after making sure my anti-virus software was up-to-date and getting behind a few proxies, I cruised over to Conservapedia where I found their essay: Greatest Conservative Songs. Since I could only think of a few conservative songs, America the Beautiful and “Let the Eagle Soar” by John Ashcroft, I decided to check the list. And wow, just wow. Either way more musicians are conservative than I realized or Conservapedia has some pretty liberal criteria for what a constitutes a “conservative song.”

Apparently Tracy Chapman’s, a singer I always thought was a progressive lesbian, hit single “Fast Car” is about “Self-help, free market, division of labor, and a criticism of alcohol” and the White Stripes’ anthemic chart topper “Seven Nation Army” is about “the growing power of conservatism.” However, nothing is more surprising than reading that Pink Floyd’s song “wish you were here,” which I always thought was about Syd Barrett, is actually “a song about wishing that a conservative president would return back to office.” Even though the single was released by a British band in 1975, during the administration of Gerald Ford (a Republican), lyrics like “So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell/blue skies from pain. Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil?” certainly make me long for Calvin Coolidge’s steadying economic hand. Conservapedia lists Coolidge as the last conservative president before the election of Ronald Reagan.

I found it odd that  revolutionary socialist, anti-Vietnam war protest singer Phil Ochs’ satirical attack on middle class lefty liberalism “Love me, I’m a liberal” is considered a conservative song. However nothing is more confusing than Guns N’ Roses’ bass blaster “Anything Goes” from the seminal album Appetite for Destruction being considered “a blatant message about the dangers of premarital sex.” With lyrics like “Panties ’round your knees/With your ass in debris/Doin’ dat grind with a push and squeeze/Tied up, tied down, up against the wall” it’s clear that Axle was advocating abstinence only sex education.

Movies

Some of the films listed here aren’t really that surprising, Red Dawn and The Ten Commandments, but I had no idea that “Space Jam” was an allegorical tale about using the values from a simpler time in America to defeat an external threat. I though that the aliens were just an excuse to get Michael Jordan and Bill Murray playing basketball with Bugs Bunny. For some reason the 1973 film “Day of the Jackal”, which depicts an attempt to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle by terrorists, is considered an acceptable conservative film. I never would have guessed: what with all the adultery, murder and homosexual content. However, it seems that “Day of the Jackal” also “celebrates conservative values like honor and duty.” Who knew? Also who knew that the Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s meditation on the ‘Global War on Terror’ disguised as a summer super hero movie, was a “Christian allegory with message of not giving in to terrorists” ?

TV Shows

Unlike the other media categories on Conservapedia, there seems to be far fewer great conservative TV shows. Surprisingly, TV shows from the 1950s and early 1960s, the era when black people lived in a different universe than middle class white people, are no where to be found. Instead of the idyllic community of Mayberry, the home spun wisdom of Ward Cleaver or even the easy going charm of Father Knows Best or My Three Sons Conservapedia contributors look to the 1960s and 1970s, with one exception Dragnet which started as a radio show in the late 1940s. It seems that there was no good conservative programming on television prior to the start of the culture wars of the late 1960s. Some of the shows, like the Waltons and 24, are not surprisingly included. However, it’s strange to see The Prisoner, a late 1960s psychedelic spy series most known for featuring a giant balloon as a character, on the list. Apparently the village that Patrick McGoohan is sent to is supposed to represent “the collective.”

And for some reason King of the Hill is considered a debatable conservative show. It apparently “shows the struggle of a hardworking, traditional American family against “alternative” modern cultural movements.” A struggle perfectly epitomized by this clip:

Shopping

If World News Daily is to be believed conservatives are very interested in deals. Every day WND posts another “Deal of the Day” or a “Special Offer” on its front page; they seem to generally want to help their readers save money on everything from spices that claim to cut blood sugar, to gold and ‘real silver’ for $3, they’re even giving a special offer on the second coming. In fact the first link on their directory is to the WND superstore where I can buy books on the satanic influences in Karl Marx’s poetry, how the holocaust was carried out by homosexuals and how all the gains American women have made over the last 40 years have been because of men.

Sex

Unlike Chris Hansen, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about pedophilia. I don’t really wake up every morning thinking about adults having sex with children. I don’t really lose sleep over whether or not pedophiles are being mainstreamed into our society. Maybe that’s my fault, for wearing my liberal blinders and not thinking about the children like WND readers do. And they really seem to think about adults and children having sex alot. In one day three articles and a deal of the day about pedophilia were uploaded.Whether it was a book alleging that famed sex researcher Alfred Kinsey based his research on “trained pedophiles” or articles explaining how psychologists want to destigmatize pedophilia; WND was overflowing with musings and reports from the child love war.

Today:

Now that the experiment is over I’m having a hard time determining if it was successful. I don’t know I was able to get real and unbiased information; but I did get a new appreciation for Anything Goes.

KTRH's new news team

By Alex Wukman

I’ll admit it, I’m a news junkie. I’m so much of a news junkie that I watch the BBC while reading the AP on my phone. My love of news has put me at odds with people in the past, I was one of the few people who supported UH buying KTRU because I’m selfish and wanted more NPR. And I especially love news radio, both the format and the brilliant sitcom. Listening to KTRH’s headline recap while riding around with my father during hot Houston summers is one of the few good memories I have of him from my childhood. So it saddened me to read today that a station I grew up listening to and relying on, a station that once promised “give us 30 minutes and we’ll give you the world,” has completed it’s transformation into a right wing mouthpiece. This morning Clear Channel announced that J.P. Pritchard and Lana Hughes, who have anchored KTRH’s drive time newscast for 27 years, have been terminated.

Pritchard and Hughes who kept readers informed of local and national matters in an even handed non sensational manner during the hellish morning commutes will be replaced by former Ohio talk jock and Tea Party darling Matt Patrick. Patrick, who has been in radio since 1979, came to national attention last fall after he claimed that Michigan State head football Mark Dantonio suffered a divinity induced heart attack after using a fake field goal to beat Notre Dame in overtime last fall. Patrick is not shy about his conservative leanings, even stating in his resume that it’s his job to “engage, entertain and discuss local and national events from a conservative viewpoint.”

To their credit Hughes and Pritchard recognize that their termination is not personal and that they are just the latest casualty as old media tries to adapt. Sadly, the case can’t be said for KTRH’s AM operations manager Bryan Erickson who told Fox 26, KRIV, that his station has “serve our listeners by being informative and entertaining.” And to accomplish the task of creating drive time infotainment KTRH’s parent company Clear Channel has decided to embrace the always insightful and informative model of Fox Friends.

According Michael Harrison publisher of Talkers magazine, who was quoted in the Chronicle, this new Steve Doocey-esque morning show will be “a more philosophical, conservative approach to morning conversation.” There are a lot of words I’d use to describe Fox and Friends but “philsophical” isn’t one of them. While it is true that Gretchen Carlson did graduate Stanford with honors, attend Oxford and could be considered a violin virtuoso she sure seems to enjoy playing the role of someone who is recovering from a frontal lobotomy.

This would be too easy to make fun of

The one saving grace out of this asinine decision to take a once good news organization and turn it into a wall-to-wall bastion of right wing talk that’s only interrupted by Astros games is that, for once, we can’t blame Michael Berry for fucking up Houston radio news. Although I’m sure we could if we try hard enough.

By Alan Smithee

A new poll released by the Texas Freedom Network finds that 80 percent of the 972 possible voters surveyed want high schools to teach contraception, including birth control and condoms, along with abstinence. According to the poll, support is fairly well spread all across the spectrum.

TFN states that “77 percent of Protestants, 82 percent of Roman Catholics and 70 percent of people who identified themselves as “born again” Christians” support teaching about contraception.  Additionally 97 percent of liberals, 93 percent of moderates and 63 percent of conservatives want their children to learn how not to get pregnant.  The lowest support among racial groups comes from whites, who still supported the idea by 78 percent.

The sentiments recognize that the majority of Texans know we have one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country. In fact it’s so high that retailers are now targeting pregnant teens specifically. Teen fashion store Forever 21 has recently launched a maternity line. The line will only available in five states–three of which, including Texas, have some of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country.

Texas’ teen pregnancy rate is so bad that, according to the Texas Department of State health services, “every 10 minutes a teen gives birth.” Needless to say, the problems with Texas sex education are nothing new and are well known throughout the country. Our problems are so notorious that the “Godless liberals”at the bastion of underage sex that is PBS produced a documentary about a 15-year-old girl’s attempt to bring comprehensive sex ed to Lubbock.

Here’s where I would quote a story that I’ve heard from a couple of different sources here in Houston. This urban legend tells about two teenage couples who want to have sex in a car but only have one condom in between them. So after the first couple is done the second allegedly turns the condom inside out, and one of the girls gets pregnant. The only problem is the baby is from the guy she didn’t  sleep with. So she sues for child support. The problem is that the story didn’t originate in Texas.

The problem with trying to bring comprehensive sex ed to Texas schools is that, even though the majority of Texans support the measure, conservatives seem to think that teaching kids to use condoms doesn’t have “common sense values.” The Liberty Institute, which describes itself as “an alliance of top state and national policy leaders” said in a statement to the media that the results of the TFN survey are “no surprise and are routinely rejected by our elected officials and common sense values of Texas.”