Spiceware sez:

If the Federal Goverment was pressuring Clear Channel, then sure, that'd be a major problem. However, all that I've seen and heard...points to "the public" applying the pressure, not the federal government.

The issue of how spontaneous that "public" pressure might be has been addressed elsewhere in this thread. Are the feds "pressuring" Clear Channel? Unlikely. Is Clear Channel perhaps doing some "proactive" sucking up to the administration (its Justice Department may, after all, someday need to write up a lengthy justification for not crying "monopoly" when Clear Channel devours all the remaining radio stations). What do you think, kids?

One station in Kansas City, Missouri held a Dixie "chicken toss" party Friday morning, where Chick critics were encouraged to dump the group's tapes, CDs and concert tickets into trash cans. [emphasis added: there's the public will in action, even if we have to, heh-heh, prime the pump]

Houston country station KILT pulled the band's records from its playlist -- at least temporarily -- after 77 percent of people polled on its Web site said they supported the move.

"We've got them off the air for right now," said Jeff Garrison, program director at KILT, which is owned by Viacom's Infinity Broadcasting Corp.

"People are shocked. They cannot believe Texas' own have attacked the state and the president," Garrison said.

Cripes, the Chicks' lead singer merely said that she was ashamed to share the same state with Bush (hell, I'm ashamed to share the same phylum). And what's this about attacking Texas? I'd call it more like an (ineffectual, doomed) effort to defend the state's honor.

I don't have a lot of use for Tim Robbins, who seems to me entirely too full of his own virtue. I loathed the smarmy and self-congratulatory "Bob Roberts": a strawman is a contemptible tool whether it's put together with the left hand or the right. This being said, I nevertheless am not disposed to dismiss his philippic. We can discuss whether the opinions of "celebrities" ought to carry any more weight than yours or mine till the cows come home (they stay out real late in these parts), but the reality is that the opinions of a Tim Robbins or a Susan Sarandon are a thousand times likelier to be reported and disseminated than ours are, and a regime still awakening to the manifold possibilities of repression, still hampered by vestigial traditions and institutions of tolerance, will gratefully accept, with a nod and a wink, a bit of patriotic voluntarism from its friends in the private sector to squelch those louder voices. Robbins tells the story of a "famous rock and roller" who "called me last week to thank me for speaking out against the war only to go on to tell me that he could not speak himself because he fears repercussions from Clear Channel. 'They promote our concert appearances,' he said. 'They own most of the stations that play our music. I can't come out against this war.'"

What conclusions can we draw? It's possible, I suppose, that Robbins is making it up. It's possible that the "famous rock and roller" was speaking out of cocaine-induced paranoia, or that he has drawn false conclusions from the Dixie Chicks episode. And it's possible that his silence and fear is, from the junta's standpoint, an agreeable consequence of that episode--not because Karl Rove has had to send stern directives to entertainment executives warning them to rein in the talent, but because the climate of intimidation the regime has built (in which, note, it is once again deeply unpatriotic to diss the president, even though that was deemed practically a civic duty under Clinton), with greedy opportunists like Clear Channel jumping aboard, serves to stifle those voices by and large as effectively as would more formal sanctions. BePatient would tell us to relax, that until Robbins and Sarandon are clapped into extermination camps (actually, given the pedigree of the Bush White House, I think that death squads would be the more characteristic response) we have nothing to worry about. And here, indeed, is where the Third Reich analogies, which are occasionally thrown about a bit too casually, would not serve us nearly as well as would a comparison with the Soviet Union in its latter decades: the Stalinist terror behind them, the grey men of the Brezhnev years found that the judicious awarding and withholding of privileges served quite adequately to keep their country's entertainers singing from the approved hymnal.

This crew is still feeling its way. Give them--or, come to that, look the other way while they steal--a second term and you won't recognize this country in another five years.

cordially,

Listen to yourself...

If nobody's making a fuss about the celebrities opinions, and those opinions are what's reported, then the government(since they hadn't heard anything to the contrary) would believe that those opinions were the same as the public

You can't really believe that, can you? That the government--this government in particular--wouldn't have a clue about the public sentiments they spend every waking hour monitoring and manipulating if it weren't for Clear Channel selflessly jumping in to organize boycotts, helping the inarticulate Teeming Masses to find their collective voice?

I mean, I know that you cite an authoritative source--a letter to the editor of the Houston Chronicle, no less!--but really, this is too silly.

cordially,