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Inside: Cultural Sausage. ~ Ludic Lists. ~ Skullbucket. Outside: Chicagoans: read a lengthy if
baffling piece I wrote about fancy-pants singer/songwriter/harpist
Joanna Newsom in the latest UR
Chicago.
"Chaldean rappers" "geeks vs. dorks" "ROGER CLEMENS BEANBALL" "celebrity toenail" "Alan Jackson smoking" "Merrill chef retarded" "pictures of drugs but ludic" "necklaces of human ears" |
10.19.2004
Attention all affiliates: Due to recent conglomerations of ownership at the management level, and especially in light of a new policy of heavy fines by the Federal Communications Commission against ownership in matters of Standards & Practices violations, it has been found neccesary to reassess certain policies. Please post these in all affiliate offices, particularly in areas where writers are known to congregate (viz., the parking lot, the men's lavatories, the smoking areas of your building, and in nearby taverns). Strict adherence to these new policy requirements and standards is mandatory. Fines hurt us all, both financially and in matters of access and license renewal. Please direct all questions of clarification to our ombudsman, who is currently on a six-week vacation in the Andes. 1. There shall henceforth be no specific references to President Bush. All news and entertainment content may refer only to "the President". News content may obliquely identify the President by reference to specific aides, policies or family members, while entertainment content should refer only to a generic president and should make no attempt to establish his identity or make note of his policies or party. This will have the further benefit of making entertainment content less dated for syndication. 2. Dancing should no longer be shown. If local programming demands dance-oriented programs, the dancers should all be male and shown only from the waist up. This will remove the possiblity of any advertant or inadvertant breast exposure during dance numbers. In addition, all network feeds featuring 'slut dancing' (see Standards & Practices Policy Statement 402.2, dated November 2002, entitled "Slut Dancing and You") should be placed on a tape delay. 3. No Arabs may be shown in entertainment content. While our policy of pre-defusing complaints of minority misrepresentation by the portrayal of all ehtnic groups as acting identically to suburban whites has been very successful, as has our policy of pre-defusing complaints of minority underrepresentation by the inclusion in all ensemble casts of one black, one Latino, one Asia, and one person of ambiguous racial stock, our testing has shown that there is no safe way to portray Middle Eastern or East Asians. Therefore, they should be ignored completely outside of news content. For further clarification, see the recent pamphlet "When a Jew Won't Do: Ethnic Bit-Part Casting In Faux-Urban Dramatocomedy". 4. Reality programming will be unaffected by the new policies, provided all real people are obtained from the Reality Corral at Central Casting. Do not place your station's income and license in jeopardy by using real real people in your reality shows. Play it safe, and use the artificial real people provided to you by Operator Resources. 5. While we encourage all affiliates to continue the practice of not referring to religious practice in any specific way, we realize that there are times -- particularly those dictated by community access standards and equal time laws -- at which you have no choice but to address matters of faith. We have done our best with the aid of our Legal Department and lobbying groups to confine these times to between the hours of 4:00AM and 8:00AM on Sunday mornings, but our success rate is not yet 100%. In the meantime, we offer this suggestion to help you through times when the mention of religion is unavoidable: make every effort to imply that all religions are the same. Do not under any circumstances allow a conversation, news story, or entertainment program to air unedited if there is a risk that it will make note of some foundational difference between religious faiths. Ideally, we would like to imply that all faiths and creeds are simply variants of the Methodist sect. For pointers on how this might be accomplished, refer to S&P bulletins #47 and #93, "Drugs Are Always Bad" and "The Two Varieties of Human Sexual Experience". |
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| TODAY'S DRIFTWOOD: "Creep up carefully on the use of force. Violence is easy to escalate, hard to de-escalate. It should never be used just to provide a release for the user's frustration." (Harlan Cleveland) |