Kerry And The Navy

[MPScholle]

Kerry And The Navy

Massachusetts Senator John Kerry claims it was his sense of public service that inspired him to enter the Navy's Officer Candidate School after his Ivy League school graduation. He acknowledged that his impending graduation from Yale ended his education deferment and that "other deferments were harder to obtain."

Instead of seeking further deferments, Kerry claimed to have chosen the honorable course of action and joined the Navy. Kerry has repeated this claim countless times while stumping for the presidency.

The reality is Kerry joined the Navy because it was the military branch least likely to involve assignment to Vietnam -- in order to avoid being drafted into the Army. Kerry admitted in a 1971 New York Times profile that "his plans to study abroad were quashed by a notice from his draft board that he would probably be called for service." According to the profile Kerry stated, "I enlisted in the Navy" rather than risk jail or avoid the draft by leaving the country. The complete article can be found here.

http://www.newscentral.tv/thepoint/attachments/09192004.htm

Kerry deserves credit for joining the Navy and for serving his country. The problem is Kerry's pattern of lies, embellishments and exaggerations to create a false image. John Kerry is not the only man to try to avoid the draft. But by not fully disclosing the actual reason why he joined the Navy and covering up his fear of the draft is just another example of a politician who just cannot be honest. One who twists the facts to support his lust for elected office.

It also casts serious doubt on the character of a man who wants to be Commander-in-Chief.

And that's The Point.

I'm Mark Hyman.

[the-dude]

Ok, now half of your posts are thread starts.

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/6305087431.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

[BigSugar]

i never new bud abbott and lou costello were gay!? they could use that poster for "Sailors Night" at The Dock. LOL!

[the-dude]

Originally posted by BigSugar
i never new bud abbott and lou costello were gay!? they could use that poster for "Sailors Night" at The Dock. LOL!
I thought the same thing! :) He is licking his lips in anticipation!

[the-dude]

Want to read about the guy that Scholle is ripping off in these cutnpaste articles?

Mark "Buster" Hyman (http://www.newscentral.tv/station/bios/mhyman.shtml)

[AngelV]

Abbot is clearly a bottom. :D

[vivalamusica]

We need some Village People music to accompany this thread.:D

[yoshomon]

I wish Bush and Kerry would get caught high on crack fucking each other in the back of Bill O'Reilly's limo. That's about the only thing I can think of that would make this election at all interesting.

[SteelTown Boy]

Originally posted by vivalamusica
We need some Village People music to accompany this thread.:D

i just saw their best of at a record store.

[the happy prole]

Tune into the evening news on Madison, Wisconsin's Fox TV affiliate and behold the future of local news. In the program's concluding segment, "The Point," Mark Hyman rants against peace activists ("wack-jobs"), the French ("cheese-eating surrender monkeys"), progressives ("loony left") and the so-called liberal media, usually referred to as the "hate-America crowd" or the "Axis of Drivel." Colorful, if creatively anemic, this is TV's version of talk radio, with the precisely tanned Hyman playing a second-string Limbaugh.

Fox 47's right-wing rants may be the future of hometown news, but -- believe it or not -- it's not the program's blatant ideological bias that is most worrisome. Here's the real problem: Hyman isn't the station manager, a local crank, or even a journalist. He is the Vice President of Corporate Communications for the station's owner, the Sinclair Broadcast Group. And this segment of the local news isn't exactly local. Hyman's commentary is piped in from the home office in Baltimore, MD, and mixed in with locally-produced news. Sinclair aptly calls its innovative strategy "NewsCentral" - it is very likely to spell the demise of local news as we know it.

The Rise of Sinclair Broadcasting

Like many a media empire, Sinclair grew through a combination of acquisitions, clever manipulations of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules, and considerable lobbying campaigns. Starting out as a single UHF station in Baltimore in 1971, the company started its frenzied expansion in 1991 when it began using "local marketing agreements" as a way to circumvent FCC rules that bar a company from controlling two stations in a single market. These "LMAs" allow Sinclair to buy one station outright and control another by acquiring not its license but its assets. Today, Sinclair touts itself as "the nation's largest commercial television broadcasting company not owned by a network." You've probably never heard of them because the 62 stations they run -- garnering 24 percent of the national TV audience -- fly the flags of the networks they broadcast: ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and the WB.

TV Barn's Mark Jeffries calls Sinclair the "Clear Channel of local news," a reference to the San Antonio, Texas, media giant that has grown from 40 to more than 1,200 stations today thanks to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which relaxed radio ownership rules. But the parallels extend beyond their growth strategies. Jeffries describes Sinclair as having a "fiercely right-wing approach that makes Fox News Channel look like a model of objectivity," while Clear Channel is best known for sponsoring pro-war "Rallies for America" during the Iraq conflict. And like Clear Channel's CEO L. Lowry Mays -- a major Republican donor and onetime business associate of George W. Bush -- the Sinclair family, board, and executives ply the GOP with big money. Since 1997, they have donated well over $200,000 to Republican candidates.

Sinclair's news department also takes a page out of Clear Channel's book of non-localized programming. According to Sinclair's website, NewsCentral is a "revolutionary news model" that introduces "local news in programming in markets that otherwise could not support news." Begun in 2002, it's being tested in five not-so-small markets: Minneapolis, Flint (MI), Oklahoma City (OK), Raleigh (NC), and Rochester (NY). (Hyman's segment, "The Point," however, is aired on all 62 of its stations.) In these five cities, the hour-long newscast combines local broadcasting with prepackaged news. To maintain the appearance of local news, the Baltimore on-air staff is coached on the intricacies of correct local pronunciations. Or the weatherman, safely removed from the thunderstorms in, say, Minneapolis, will often engage in scripted banter with the local anchor to maintain the pretense: "Should I bring an umbrella tomorrow, Don?" "You bet, Hal, it looks pretty ugly out there..."

Journalists have been pondering the specter of centralized news operations for some time, both because it affects the quality of news and because it could put them out of a job. "We should all be conscious of the dangers that are present when you have one newsroom producing the news," says John Nichols, associate editor at The Capital Times in Madison and co-author with Robert McChesney of the books "Our Media, Not Theirs," and "It's the Media, Stupid." "That's a real possibility. It's a very dangerous future, but Sinclair is already living in the dangerous future."

[SteelTown Boy]

and also why on some nights the UPN newscasts produced by KDKA(their sister station in Pgh) beats them. Sinclair owns the Fox/WB stations here and they gutted their newscasts for Newscentral.

www.upnpittsburgh.com