I will be honest: although I always hope for the best, I never really expected the Big Houses here in Seattle to have some sort of Road-to-Damascus conversion and start doing the right thing. I always assumed they would continue to offer safe and staid programming and promote it with safe and staid marketing techniques. So when I read in this week’s Stranger that the Fifth Avenue was paying for coverage on KING 5 TV’S New Day Northwest without making it plain that the coverage was sponsored, I was actually genuinely shocked. And I have to confess, it gave me a bit of pleasure, because I honestly did not think that, given their tepid programming, the Big Houses could ever possibly shock me again.
Folks, this story will get spun by the culpable spinners. Those of us who are appalled by this supremely less than ethical behavior will be branded as naïve and bitter; but this is exactly the sort of thing the Bush Administration tried to pull.
…the White House, … spent taxpayer money to produce local TV-news segments advocating policies of the Bush administration. The Government Accountability Office condemned these paid-for "news" segments as "covert propaganda," but the White House instructed agencies to ignore the GAO findings.
"As a former journalist, I'm horrified to be compared with the Bush administration," Larson said. "This isn't a news program—it's an entertainment program."
If the Rep and the Fifth cannot see what they did was wrong, then they have no business offering us art that purports to be honest, edgy, and untainted by corporate equivocation.
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PS: Brendan Kiley suggests here that all the Big Houses, plus the little ones like WET, too, owe him back pay for covering them, but I would further suggest that NewsWrights United covered the Seattle theatre press in last fall’s It’s Not in the P-I: A Living Newspaper about a Dying Newspaper, so perhaps they in turn owe us a little som’n-som’n. Granted, I wrote about Misha Berson and Joe Adcock. (You can watch the video here. ) and left out Kiley, because, let’s face it, he’s just too boring. But Brendan? If you’re willing to make me an offer I’ll happily write a play about how you wrote an article about how the Fifth bought buzz and convinced the Rep to join their ethically dubious enterprise, for what I can only imagine was what they saw as the high-ground cover the Rep could offer them if the shit hit (which it did). Forget cover, Big Houses. Your cover is blown. Get started living right, or get started dying. There are no longer any in-betweens.
PPS: A year and a half a go The Stranger gave me a hunk of change for being a “Genius”. Obviously, this is a bogus award, the sole purpose of which was to get me to push traffic over to their website. So go, damn you, go! I don’t want them asking for their money back!
PPPS: I hate loving The Stranger, but given the connect-the-dots drawing of Mohammad they ran on the front of this issue, how can I help my damned self.
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