A Plea to Conservative Networks: Practice What You Preach

Of the many gains made by the Republicans in the Senate, there was one very noticeable loss. Pete Coors, the beer magnate, who hails from a staunchly conservative and Republican family, lost in Colorado, a strongly Republican state. There were many causes for his loss, but one of the least noted was that morality voters who now dominate the Republican party view Coors, whose beer commercials are some of the most sexually explicit and exploitative on TV, as a phony and a hypocrite. You see, Pete, you can't campaign on the need for morality and values, when your most famous contribution to the American pop culture is the Coors Beer twins.

After all, which parents would want to sit and watch Sunday football on TV with their kids and suddenly see two, near-naked Barbie-like airheads, hocking Coors beer on their television screen? Would you elect a guy as senator who makes you uncomfortable inviting your own son to watch the game with you?

I am glad that values-minded Americans chose not to give Pete Coors a pass. It is high time that we held individuals and corporations accountable for the sleaze they bring to our society and the corruption of our children, even when those corporations have an otherwise laudable record of promoting values and education.

A strong case in point is Rupert Murdoch's global media company, NewsCorp. Conservative Americans like me are very grateful to Murdoch and Fox News for offering a welcome alternative to what we perceive to be the strong liberal bias in the media. We are tired of hearing Palestinian terrorists described as "militants" by CNN and the New York Times, and we are sickened by the media's apologia for brutal dictators like Saddam Hussein. Fox News has become a runaway hit because it does not believe that journalism ought to include hushing up Saddam's atrocities, as CNN head Eason Jordan admitted doing in an op-ed in the New York Times the day after the fall of Baghdad. Murdoch has financed outstanding conservative journals like The Weekly Standard so that there is some balance to the left-leaning media, like Slate and The Nation.

But there is another side of NewsCorp that conservatives and values-minded folks are guilty of overlooking. While the Fox News Channel is unafraid to offer a courageously values-based viewpoint, the Fox Television network led the way in airing the most offensive tabloid and sexually exploitative programming on TV.

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