A new year and a new horrific story of US military gone wild!
Captain Owen Honors has been relieved of his duties over the aircraft carrier the USS Enterprise because of some joke videos he made a couple of years ago. The media is outraged! Forget the Navy’s overreaction here, that’s another issue.
Oh, make no mistake about it, the media is not just reporting this story, they clearly show their disgust and outrage that anybody would make politically incorrect videos and live to play another day.
I don’t know the politics of Captain Owens, and I don’t care. I do know the politics of the media and over the years I’ve seen plenty of joke videos that people in newsrooms have produced.
“Christmas Reels” is what they are sometimes called, videos that show the outtakes of mistakes during newscasts and behind the scene antics.
What I have seen of the Captain Owens video is mild compared to some of the newsroom videos I have seen. There’s no need to get specific with names, because they were done in the context of people joking about the business and relieving the pressures that you sometimes find in a newsroom (BTW, I’m guessing the pressures of working on an aircraft carrier during time of war are just a bit greater than the pressure of a newsroom at 4:30 in the afternoon.) Like this video on the aircraft carrier, the newsroom videos were not intended for outside viewing.
If I told you that newsroom videos were produced ridiculing an African-American reporter for his pronunciation of certain words, would you be surprised? Yep, the video was done and it was a running joke in the newsroom for years afterwards. These videos were for internal use only and may have been destroyed by now, so if it aint on videotape, I guess it never happened, right?
How about videos making fun of the Shuttle Challenger explosion? Yep—there was one of those too. Another funny Christmas Reel.
How about videos making fun of those in the newsroom with weird sexual fetishes? Roll the tape, boys!
Don’t even begin the discussion about sexual innuendo or harassment—that is commonplace and always gets a good laugh.
How about a video of a newsroom employee abusing a homeless person? I’ve seen that as well. Merry Christmas!
How about videos showing outtakes from photographers of bodies at scenes? Burned, mangled, decapitated—yep, photogs have those videos as well. They are not always included in the annual highlight reel when dinner is involved, but I’ve seen them and they are part of the internal videos you find in virtually every newsroom.
I absolutely guarantee you that those self-righteous news anchors sitting on set talking about the horror of these videos shot on a US aircraft have either seen, participated in, or been part of the making of videos in newsrooms that they would never want shown to the public.
Of course, the media would argue that the job of somebody running an aircraft carrier is much more important than theirs (they wouldn’t really believe that, but they would say it,) so the Captain should be held to a higher standard, but there is no indication that security was in jeopardy here, if it were, then deal with that issue. Besides, we’re talking about the issue of what is decent and what is not decent. The activist old media has set that standard, so lets go there.
I’m not so silly to think that the activist old media will ever hold itself to the same standard that they hold their subjects to. There are two sets of rules here, one for the media, another for the people they wish to destroy, in this case, it’s a member of the US military.
[youtube Hah! Hah! Funny Newsroom Video! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxsRTImDMb0]
Just for fun, here’s one I found on YouTube, it took me :30 to find this—this is very, very mild but notice the sexual harassment at the 1:20 mark of this video. Yep, I don’t know what else you would call this other than sexual harassment. I’m not saying anybody should be held accountable—I don’t know these people and I don’t really care—but I also know that at the end of this video the person “anchoring” has relegated the minority male to doing the vacuuming in the newsroom. Ignore the context of a fun-loving joke and take this stuff seriously and see what your conclusion is. Every newsroom has these tapes and there are thousands of them out there.
Katie, Dianne and Brian had better well hope that any videos they may have been a part of have long since been destroyed…I’m sure if they’re out there somewhere we’ll see them shortly on an evening newscast coming soon (ha, ha—just a little newsroom humor there.)
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