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December 2007
Should “Zoey 101” be shelved because star Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant?
Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, responds.
Rebuttal
Kids will view entertainers as role models whether we want them to or not. And in this case, Jamie Lynn Spears’ show was purposely designed to create a good role model. It is massively popular among 9 to 14-year-olds, and pre-teens and teens around the country talked about little but her pregnancy in the days after it was announced. So like it or not, Nickelodeon’s choice for the show will have a defining impact.
The entire point of Zoey 101 was to show a decent girl confronting real-life situations and largely making good choices — and seeing the consequences when she and others don’t. If Nickelodeon now chooses to keep the show, tens of millions of kids will absorb the biggest lesson of all: A role model can make a terrible choice to have underage sex, end up pregnant, and life will go on as normal — nothing will really change. In other words: in real life, there aren’t consequences after all. What a recipe for instilling cynicism in this entire watching generation!
It’s already difficult to help kids understand that single parenthood changes everything when actresses like Nicole Ritchie purposefully choose it. The average teen doesn’t grasp that non-millionaire single parents have a complete change in life expectations - and often endure struggle, exhaustion and poverty.
Nickelodeon is reportedly considering a response special on love and sex, but that is not enough. The studio should keep the same compassionate tone with which they’ve responded to the Spears family, but they must shelve Zoey 101 and tell millions of watching kids why prioritizing the right message is worth the financial loss. And it would bring such good out of a bad situation if Jamie Lynn herself would be the message-bearer - if she would look into the camera and tell her audience that she’d made a life-changing mistake and was accepting the consequences.
Nickelodeon’s website says it is, “the most-watched television network by kids in the United States… [and its] ‘kids first’ philosophy is the key element to its business successes.” In this difficult situation, the only real way to be “kids first” is to ask Jamie Lynn to publicly step aside as a role model.
Who is The Most Admirable Woman of 2007?
Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, responds.
Commentary
This year, I wish I could nominate my former sparring partner, the late Diane Glass, for a victorious fight over cancer. Unfortunately, that wasn’t meant to be. But this year, we’ve seen the rise of a female world leader that Diane, Andy, or anyone else can admire despite ideological differences.
Germany’s conservative Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is one of the most highly-respected politicians in the world. Her 75 percent approval rating bests previous Chancellors back to World War II, and she has brought a sense of possibility and positive feeling to the German government and the nation. A positive feeling much-needed in the world today - and which should be a model for the very different, ambitious woman looking to lead America.
After I selected Merkel as “Most Admirable Woman” I realized that Forbes had named her the most Powerful Woman of the Year. But one thing that makes her remarkable is that she allows people to forget about her gender instead of constantly highlighting it. She’s not so much a “Powerful Woman” as a powerful leader. And that now includes world leadership, presiding over the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations (G8) and the European Union. At this summer’s G8 summit she focused on - and got — a key commitment from member nations to cut greenhouse gasses. She also placed Africa high on her agenda and pushed members to pony up for the non-sexy but absolutely critical problem of African poverty and AIDS. Within the European Union, she led all 27 member states to agree to a landmark reform treaty.
Under her leadership, the G8 also launched a little-known but revolutionary mechanism for international dialogue that could change the face of the globe. The Heiligendamm Process recognizes that the major industrialized and developing countries absolutely have to cooperate - regularly, with specific targets — in order to solve the global economy’s main challenges. As Chancellor Merkel declared, “meeting up once a year during a summit was not enough.” And while I know some hard-core feminists will be indignant at this theory, I believe that in blowing aside traditional turf battles and stressing more collaboration, Merkel is applying a much-needed female leadership style to the world’s challenges.
Rebuttal
Ever help out on a farm? I have, once or twice. Picking bugs off bean plants, watching pigs gnaw at my knees as I tossed down their slop, I thought, “Why do people live like this?” Despite this fact, my pick for The Most Admirable Woman of 2007 is Barbara Kingsolver, an author who writes of the unparalleled importance of small farms.
Mass factory farms have created unprecedented bounty, bringing low cost food to the masses. Yet increasingly we wonder: at what true price? Our healthiest food travels less than 75 miles to reach us, yet the average supermarket staple travels 1500 miles, passing through countless handoffs. Nutrients are lost in the process, food security may be compromised. You certainly can’t say that about just-picked produce featured at the farmer’s market.
Fiction writer Barbara Kingsolver (The Bean Trees, The Poisonwood Bible) becomes seriously self-sufficient in “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.” Written with her family, Kingsolver details their year-long experiment as “locavores,” eating only food procured at or near their rural Virginia home. Part call to action, part funny family memoir, part recipe collection, part valentine to the land and those who use it well, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” is the book that should finally bring stragglers to the local food table.
Does this sound preachy? Oddly enough, not when Kingsolver says it. In fact, each accumulated chapter of “Animal, Vegetable, and Miracle” has the opposite effect. You begin to think: Kingsolver does so much to feed her family from regional, sustainable farms, I can do something. I can put more of my grocery dollars toward food that’s from here, and not break the bank. I can realize that turning my back on local growers has too many consequences for my community and my health, not to mention my taste buds.
So whether you’re a committed locavore or just someone who plans to hit the farmer’s market more often-someone like me- you’ll find a gifted guide in Barbara Kingsolver. With passionate prose and no small amount of gumption, she encourages all of us to stay closer to home, for meals that make a daily difference in our lives.
Is There a War on Christmas?
Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, responds.
Commentary
For the past few years, America has been fighting a difficult war.
No, not that one.
It’s the “war” Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly and his “cultural warriors” battle every December, trying to save Christmas. Frothing at the mouth for hours of air time, O’Reilly extrapolates from church vs. state skirmishes and politically correct marketing efforts a national conspiracy to eradicate Christmas.
It’s ironic, because what this avowed patriot is actually railing against couldn’t be more American: the First Amendment. Charles Haynes, a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, explains the guiding principle- simply, to “treat people of all faiths or none with fairness and respect.” Therefore, holiday programs “shouldn’t make any students feel excluded or identified with a religion not their own.” Religious music shouldn’t dominate a choral program, but can be included. Public seasonal displays should contain both secular and religious elements.
Some school and city officials choose to excise the holidays completely in order to avoid offense. Haynes, a consultant to school districts, feels that year-round education on various religions is a more effective way to mitigate the “December Dilemma”. Though well versed on all viewpoints of the issue, he still doesn’t understand the attack on more all-encompassing greetings like “Happy Holidays”: “People who use that expression are just trying to be kind.”
One of the more insidious aspects of this trumped-up “war” is an eagerness to blame everything on what Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council calls “over-zealous secularist officials.” Clever indeed. Pretend the separation of church and state only matters to secular leftists and the rabid right won’t sound like they’re trying to propagate a religious crusade.
Plenty of Christians find this annual “campaign” unsavory, with its militaristic lingo and threatening stocking stuffers. A red wristband demanding “Just Say Merry Christmas” begs the question: is this something Jesus would wear?
Still, if I was forced to pick a gift from the Christmas war catalog, I guess I’d go with Bill O’ Reilly’s- I kid you not- “Culture Warrior” doormat. At least that way I could be sure not to track this ugliness into my house, especially during the holidays.
Rebuttal
“Religious music shouldn’t dominate a choral program?” About Christmas? Is it any wonder that Christmas feels under attack?
Every year, more municipalities, companies, shops and schools ban nativity scenes, enforce “Winter Holiday” lingo or — as Fort Collins did recently — create a “Holiday Display Task Force” to ensure there are no public-property displays of traditional Christmas references. Not even colored lights. Isolated instances have become mainstream - and repeated by the thousands. School choir directors from Virginia to Wisconsin don’t want to change the words of Christmas carols, but (incorrectly) feel like they are supposed to, or are told to, “just to be safe.” So “Silent Night” becomes “Cold in the Night.” (“I wish I were happy and warm, safe with my family out of the storm.”) Residents of HUD-subsidized senior homes from Florida to California are told they can no longer invite in carolers or even put up their own religious decorations on their doors. Company employees, shopkeepers, teachers, and parents from Texas to New York are told to remove traditional Christmas references from decorations and “think snowman” instead.
And those beleaguered city Christmas trees feel like the remaining veterans from WWII; we’re glad they’re still around, but is this their last Christmas? For 34 years, Nova Scotia has given a tree to the City of Boston, which is then named the Boston Christmas Tree. Until this year. It’s now the Boston Holiday Tree.
Maybe we should take a cue from England. Trevor Phillips, the Equality and Human Rights Commission Chairman, invited non-Christian leaders to help keep Christmas alive. Shayk Ibrahim Mogra, a Bristish Muslim leader, answered best with, “To suggest celebrating Christmas and having decorations offends Muslims is absurd. Why should Christmas not be celebrated openly and wholeheartedly in our country when a vast majority of people are Christians?”
Silent Night, Holy Night. All is calm, all is bright. Round yon virgin, mother and child. Holy infant, so tender and mild…
Despite increasing concern over the removal of Christ from Christmas, that holy infant came to bring tidings of great joy and love. And in the debate over preserving the reason for the season, we cannot defend love with a lack of it.
Should parents be warned about ‘family’ movies like ‘The Golden Compass’?
Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, responds.
Commentary
The Golden Compass is the first book in a controversial but wildly popular British trilogy by Phillip Pullman. And it’s now a blockbuster holiday kids’ movie. What parents don’t know is that the books are about children on a quest to save the world from an oppressive and senile God named Yaweh (which is God’s name in the real Hebrew Bible), and from the deception and control of his religious leaders. They save the world, in part, by actually killing God.
Most American parents have been completely unaware of the series. When first published here in 2001, Joan Slattery of Knopf Books for Young Readers told the Washington Post that she was “pleasantly surprised and relieved” that there hadn’t been any complaints.
Well, that’s all changed. And parents must be warned that this special-effects-laden, exciting movie is based on books that they - hopefully - would never want their kids to read.
The movie promotion, of course, never mentions these concerns, and the author has been indignant about claims that he has a subversive agenda. Which is funny, since he proudly told the Washington Post in 2001 that in the trilogy, “I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief.”
Now, I applaud the studio for watering down the most overtly anti-religious material from the first book for the movie. At least they made it more family friendly. But as Kiera McCaffrey of the Catholic League explained in an interview, “Making family friendly movies is laudable, and we are not so concerned with the film per se — but it poses a bigger problem. Because parents and kids will see this movie and then want the books…and the books aren’t watered down.”
Parents need to know that the first step will lead to another. And the next books are disturbing. We saw this trend with Harry Potter - as each book and movie got darker and darker, to the point that many parents would never have let their kids read the last book, had it come out first.
I’m sad that parents even have to worry about this, especially at this time of year; that as many families celebrate the birth of Christ, a foothold is given to books that want to do anything but.
Rebuttal
E-mails from far right groups like the Catholic League are whipping around the country, warning parents that THE GOLDEN COMPASS movie will lure children into reading Phillip Pullman’s darker fictional trilogy.
“He wants kids to denounce God and Heaven” one woman pronounces in an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article on the controversy, “but does it in a very subtle way that parents may not pick up on.”
Or kids, for that matter. Picture evangelical teens sneaking copies of “The Golden Compass” the way other kids sneak cigarettes, and finding themselves terribly confused—by not by a challenge to their faith. “Dear Lord” they’ll say, “Please help my parents with their fear of fictional talking polar bears.”
Pullman does kill off an ineffectual God in the final book, and did once say that he’s undermining Christian belief. Yet that infamous quote read in context is merely part of a glib attack on other fantasy books for being racist and misogynistic. In fact, the primary focus of the 2001 Washington Post article was surprise at how well readers could separate fact from fiction, finding artistry instead of offense. Editor Joan Slattery said at the time, “I think it’s a testament to the intelligence of his fans that nobody has objected to it.”
Ah, Joan. Never underestimate the power of hysterical groupthink.
Pullman’s books are mainstream bestsellers; over seven million copies have been sold in the U.S. alone. More importantly, this is award-winning fiction. They’ve won the American Library Association’s Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults, Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of the Year, England’s prestigious Carnegie Medal and, even the “Carnegie of Carnegies”, a special award given to one book in the 70-year history of the Medal. Yet none of that counts for anything, because a fictional God is disparaged?
Parenting is hard: How much easier sometimes to hop on a campaign, taking comfort in the righteousness of its tone. Here’s another suggestion: Picture a favorite literature teacher from school, one that inspired you to challenge yourself with every novel. Would that respected mentor say that you’ve remembered the class, but forgotten the lesson? Devotion to the ultimate Good Book, however strong, is no reason to fear the others.
Are Hollywood writers strike demands justified?
Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, responds.
Commentary
Late night talk shows are in reruns, and America is getting more sleep— especially since the writers’ strike itself sure isn’t keeping anyone up at night. After all, the thinking goes, why do a bunch of rich Hollywood writers need a union anyway?
Yet take a closer look at this labor dispute and you’ll quickly see that this is about more than an opportunity to catch Jay Leno passing out donuts in a picket line.
A central bargaining system helps both management and staff in an industry with countless, separate productions. Yet don’t imagine both sides have equally deep pockets. A misleading statistic bandied about is that the average Writers Guild of America member makes $204,000 a year. Yet the far more significant number is the median writing income—a whopping $5,000 a year. In other words, skim the millionaires off the top and the picture shifts dramatically to one of many underemployed creatives, hoping to stay in the middle class through moonlighting and residuals.
When the Writers Guild agreed to paltry residuals for DVD sales, they reluctantly bought into the assertion of network and studio executives that this was an unproven market. Writers instantly regretted their compliance; DVDs brought in $24 billion in revenues last year alone.
The biggest sticking point now is new media, residuals for work seen on the internet, cellphones and iPods. Once again, management is pulling out the tired old claim that they would love to compensate writers more, but see new media profits as unpredictable. Meanwhile, industry executives are saying just the opposite to investors and the public. Typical is Sumner Redstone’s claim caught on videotape that “Viacom will double its revenue in digital”.
Yet what if the new media bonanza is a shooting star, dying as soon as it soars into sight? This is where management’s argument totally falls apart. Think about it: all the writers want is a small cut should massive profits once more be realized. As industry blogger Jan McLaughlin put it, “5% of nothing is nothing. What do the studios lose if internet entertainment never proves a gold mine? Nothing. If internet-based entertainment makes money, share. Share with the people who helped you make the magic happen.”
Rebuttal
It’s compelling to think of the strike as being about writers trying to make ends meet. I empathize with the writers (being one myself), but there’s a much bigger issue at stake. This is really about the development of a whole new industry requiring speed, flexibility, and lots of extra R&D cash - assets notoriously hindered by cumbersome union contracts.
To Hollywood studios, this era of ‘new media’ sales looks a lot like what happened when IBM first sold something called the personal computer. A whole new industry! The Wild West! A new frontier — with dozens of competitors rushing to get a patch of land without getting killed.
Imagine if a hypothetical programmers union had said in 1989, “This whole ‘software’ thing is going to be huge. Our union contract should codify that for the next 20 years, we’ll be paid x% for every line of code.” That would have been ludicrous: programming evolved so quickly (requiring fewer lines of code, for example) that cementing something in stone during the Wild West period would have been counterproductive.
In the same way, Hollywood producers and studios find it impossible to define the new media Wild West enough to set in stone what the writer’s union was initially asking for. I mean think about it: we didn’t even [ITAL] have [END ITAL] cell phones playing video clips just a few years ago! Who knows how the profits from that are going to work in just one year, much less ten?
It’s also misleading to say five percent of nothing is nothing: it’s not easy to define which profits writers should get a share of. Producers and studios take all the risk and are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into program development and the new media infrastructure. As Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers (AMPTP) president Nick Counter told “Screen International,” producers want to be able to at least cover the cost of an individual project before paying residuals.
Writers absolutely deserve a piece of the new media action, especially once the industry settles a bit. But there has to be a way to get it without risking new union contracts that impede Hollywood’s ability to leverage this new industry.
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Commentary
By Andrea Cornell Sarvady
In case you were visiting Mars over the holidays, let me catch you up: Jamie Lynn Spears, sister of tabloid-fave Britney and the 16 year old star of “Zoey 101” just added to Center for Disease Control statistics showing teen pregnancy on the rise after a fourteen year downturn. A pregnant underage star? No wonder some parents are demanding that the already completed fourth season of her show, due to premiere in February, be shelved.
Nickelodeon may have no choice but to scrap the final season, though it’s a shame—bright and unpretentious, Zoey is a great character, even if her real-life counterpart has fallen far. In either case, the news is everywhere, forcing parents to have tough conversations with their tweens, whose disappointment echoes that felt by sports fans when baseball’s steroid scandal broke.
In addition to an awkward sex talk, a lesson in differentiating between private and public personas is equally valuable here. As parents we need to ask ourselves: have we encouraged our kids to infuse celebrity with more credibility than it deserves?
Underplayed in the recent Hannah Montana concert crisis: after online brokers cruelly snatched up vast amounts of seats, many parents opted to pay exorbitant prices rather than disappoint their Hannah acolyte. Previous generations of parents merely rolled their eyes at pop star obsessions—why is ours trying so hard to join the fan club?
Jamie Lynn’s pregnancy is a trainwreck, even if her own mother prefers to treat it as a public event, selling her story to a tabloid for a million dollars. Distressing to be sure, but nothing many of us haven’t grown to expect from Hollywood—and nothing girls raised with other dreams will want to emulate. After her initial shock, my own eleven-year-old quipped, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the sister, does it?”
On the hunt for a role model who won’t transform into the butt of a cynical joke? Try looking in the mirror. If we convey enough enthusiasm for our own lives, maybe our children won’t need to worship images as carefully constructed as movie sets—and just as false.