Sarah Palin leaves door open to Presidential bid
(New York) Sarah Palin said in an interview broadcast Tuesday that a 2012 presidential bid is “not on my radar,” but wouldn’t rule out playing some role in the next presidential election.
“My ambition, if you will, my desire is to help our country in whatever role that may be, and …
Tags: Ambition, Bid, Broadcast, Desire, Leaves, Next Presidential Election, Radar, Sarah PalinMaine activists debate marriage
Activists held one last debate in Maine on marriage broadcast on the local ABC affiliate.
Tags: Abc Affiliate, Activists, Broadcast, Debate, Maine Marriage, marriage‘Survivor’ Hatch says imprisoned because he’s gay
(Newport) “Survivor” winner Richard Hatch said in an interview broadcast Tuesday that he believes he was sent to prison because he’s gay, a claim the prosecutors in the case call baseless and delusional.
Hatch, speaking publicly for the first time since being released from prison to home confinement, told NBC’s “Today” …
Tags: Broadcast, gay, Home Confinement, Nbc, Nbc Today, Newport, Prosecutors, Richard Hatch, Survivor Hatch, Survivor WinnerHBO RANKS HIGHEST IN THIRD ANNUAL “GLAAD NETWORK RESPONSIBILITY INDEX”
ABC Leads Broadcast Networks for Third Year in a Row; NBC and CBS Receive “Failing” Grades for Lack of Inclusion of the LGBT Community
Los Angeles, CA, July 27, 2009 – The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) today released its third annual Network Responsibility Index, a report that maps the quantity, quality and diversity of images of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people on television. Primetime programming on the five broadcast networks was evaluated as well as original primetime programming on 10 of the highest-rated cable networks.
HBO scored the highest rating of the 15 networks evaluated with LGBT characters on shows including True Blood, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency and Entourage that reflect the ethnic and racial diversity of the LGBT community. Of HBO’s 14 original series, 10 included LGBT content and 42 percent of the network’s total programming hours included LGBT representation.
“This year programming was not only inclusive of LGBT people, but networks like HBO are beginning to reflect the broad diversity within our community,” said Rashad Robinson, Senior Director of Media Programs at GLAAD. “With upcoming fall programming and new storylines there is a tremendous opportunity for networks to share the stories of all members of our community including lesbian, bisexual and transgender people as well as LGBT people of color, all groups which continue to be underrepresented across all networks.”
GLAAD reviewed a total of 4,901 hours of primetime programming for inclusion of LGBT characters or issues on the five major networks (ABC, CBS, The CW, Fox and NBC) from June 1, 2008 to May 31, 2009. GLAAD also examined 1,212.5 hours of original primetime programming on 10 highly-rated cable networks. Each hour was reviewed for on-screen LGBT representations. Based on the quantity, overall quality and diversity of these representations, a rating was assigned by GLAAD’s Entertainment Media Program to each network: Excellent, Good, Adequate, or Failing.
Additional findings from the GLAAD Network Responsibility Index:
Good
- HBO and Showtime received grades of Good, with HBO leading with 42 percent of programming hours featuring LGBT representations.
- ABC, with shows including Brothers & Sisters, Grey’s Anatomy and Ugly Betty, again received the highest ranking of the five broadcast networks, earning a Good grade with 24 percent of their primetime programming hours including LGBT representations.
- The CW also received a grade of Good, with 20 percent of their primetime programming hours including LGBT representations.
Adequate
- While Fox received an Adequate, rising from last place and a Failing grade in 2008; 11 percent of its programming hours were LGBT-inclusive, yet some of those hours included problematic content.
- Among cable networks evaluated, TNT showed the largest growth, jumping from one percent of LGBT inclusive primetime programming hours last year to 19 percent. FX posted the sharpest decline, dropping 32 percent over the previous season. Both were graded
Failing
- NBC and CBS received Failing grades, for their 8 and 5 percent, respectively, of programming hours with LGBT images. CBS moved down from third place in last year’s GLAAD Network Responsibility Index to last among the five major broadcast networks.
- A&E, Sci Fi and TBS received grades of Failing.
“Television shows that weave our stories into the fabric of the series present richer, more accurate representations and are the kinds of images that help Americans understand and embrace their LGBT family members, friends and neighbors in a more meaningful way,” said Robinson.
The third annual GLAAD Network Responsibility Index was delivered to programming executives at the 15 graded networks, and GLAAD’s Entertainment Media Program will continue discussions with them to advocate for improvements in the quality, quantity and diversity of their LGBT representations.
The Executive Summary of the report can be viewed online at GLAAD.org. A PDF of the full report can also be downloaded at GLAAD.org.
The 14th Annual GLAAD Where We Are On TV report on diversity will be issued in September 2009. This analysis will examine LGBT inclusion as well as the gender and race/ethnicity of all scripted characters scheduled to appear during the 2009-2010 season.
About GLAAD
The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) is dedicated to promoting and ensuring fair, accurate and inclusive representation of people and events in the media as a means of eliminating homophobia and discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. For more information, please visit www.glaad.org.
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Homosexuals dispel myth of “progressive”
Each year in Germany, from the end of June through August, gay and lesbian rights’ activists celebrate the “Stonewall” uprising - named after a gay bar on Christopher Street in New York, where homosexuals fought back against police brutality in 1969.
Participants in the German parades known as “Christopher Street Day” join other activists around the world who take to the streets to demonstrate gay pride and demand greater freedoms.
Some of those freedoms would include expanded civil rights. In Germany, civil unions, for instance, have been permitted among same-sex couples since 2001, but full marriages are not. Homosexual couples therefore do not enjoy the same rights as married heterosexual couples when it comes to taxes, retirement, civil servant benefits, or adoption law.
For more on gay and lesbian rights and the community in Germany, click on the links below, or listen to this week’s “Living in Germany” program to hear a more personal account of a homosexual civil union.
DW-WORLD.DE
Audios and videos on the topic
See Homosexuals dispel myth of “progressive” Germany Deutsche Welle
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Bruno — Based on a Real Gay Austrian?!
The dude caught in the middle is Alfons Haider — he’s proud to be gay, he’s into fashion, and (just like Bruno) he’s also been known to compare himself to Zac Efron.
Want more evidence? — Alfons is the highest-paid presenter on Austrian state broadcaster ORF. In the film, Bruno works for a channel called OJRF. Coincidence?
The controversy has been raging in Austria
for a while, but Haider just told The Telegraph newspaper, “I never understood the comparison to myself at all. The only comparisons I can think of is that I’m Austrian, I’m gay, and I work for television, but the rest is completely fiction.”See
Bruno — Based on a Real Gay Austrian?!
TMZ.com -
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Pride Mass, Pride Booth & March down Market Street highlights Oasis Celbration of SF Pride 2009
The Episcopal Diocese of California will mark this year’s San Francisco Pride Celebration & Parade by celebrating a Pride Mass, staffing a booth one the Pride Festival grounds and sending a diverse contingent down Market Street during the Pride Parade. Set for Saturday June 27 and Sunday June 28, Pride events are free and open to the public.
The Pride Mass
Our Bishop, the RT. Rev. Marc Andrus, will join Lutheran Bishop Mark Holmerund in celebrating our annual Pride Mass. Set to start at 10:30 AM, we will worship on the street at the location where we gather to march in the parade (check back here or at www.oasisca.org a few days before the parade for the exact location). Members of the Lutherans Concerned contingent will join us for this special outdoor Eucharist.
The Celebration Booth
On Saturday and Sunday, volunteers from Oasis California will staff a booth on the Pride Celebration grounds near City Hall. Oasis Board Members Judy Lebens and Justin Cannon are coordinating this aspect of our celebration. For the first time in several years we’ll be able to talk with people about our work to include LGBT as full members of our church, our stand for marriage equality, and the location of LGBT friendly Episcopal congregations around the Bay Area. We’ll also be distributing information on the Bible, homosexuality, Anglicanism and Oasis California. To volunteer or find out where to send information about your parish please e-mail Judy and Justin at booth@oasisca.org.
The Parade & Cable Car
On Sunday our diocese will be represented by a contingent of LGBT Episcopalians and their straight allies, friends, family members, fellow congregants and children. This year we will have a cable car bus so that people who can’t walk the route can join in the parade. The cable car offers a great way for children to be part of the parade. As we march down Market Street we’ll be distributing more than 1,000 “Blessed Bubbles” kits to help people “spread joy & dispel fear of marriage equality.”
♫
We Need Parade Monitors!
Once again we are recruiting people to serve as monitors, a post that requires a brief training session and comes with a neat button. There is also the fact that without enough parade monitors, our contingent will not march. Two Oasis volunteers, Fernando and Charles, are coordinating our monitors. To volunteer as a monitor, please e-mail them at parade@oasisca.org.
Monitor training programs include:
· Wed 6/17 7:00 pm Kaiser Permanente, 1800 Harrison, Oakland
· Fri 6/19 7:00 pm Ceremonial Room - The Center, 1800 Market St.,SF
· Sat 6/20* 12:00 pm Koret Auditorium - SF Library, 100 Larkin St, SF
· Sat 6/20 3:00 pm Women’s Building Auditorium, 3543 18th St, SF
· Tue 6/23* 8:30 pm Head over Heels, 4701 Doyle St # F, Emeryville
· (Additional sessions will probably be scheduled in San Francisco just before Pride.)
If you can’t join us, Watch on TV
There are four ways to watch the 39th annual San Francisco Pride Parade:
· LIVE Broadcast: On Comcast Digital Channel 99 starting at 10:00 a.m. in all Comcast serviceable areas throughout California.
· LIVE Webcast: Clear Channel Radio on SFPrideLive.com Live & Uncensored from 10:00 a.m. until the end.
· Prime Time: KOFY TV 20/Cable 13, starting at 8:00 p.m.
· Comcast: Comcast Channel 1 On Demand/Local Events starting June 29th at 7:00 p.m. until July 31st
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Ex-TV anchor is Detroit’s 1st openly gay candidate
When reporter and anchor Charles Pugh told viewers of Detroit’s Fox television affiliate about his gay lifestyle, he gambled that people in his working-class hometown still would accept him as a journalist. That was about five years ago, and over that time Pugh’s popularity grew to where he became one of the more recognizable faces on local news broadcasts. He is banking on that translating into enough votes to make him the city’s first openly gay city council member. “I didn’t know what would happen, but at that point it didn’t matter to me because I knew it was the right thing to do,” Pugh told The Associated Press. “I think there will be people who grumble about it and some people who may stray away from voting for me because of that, but I think Detroiters already know me. I believe Detroiters are open-minded, hardworking people who really do accept people who are different. ” See Ex-TV anchor is Detroit’s 1st openly gay candidate
Chicago Tribune
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KRXQ Sacramento Radio Hosts Have History of Obscenity Involving Children: FCC Report
In the wake of the media and Internet firestorm which followed a call to action by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and coverage in The Huffington Post, which broke this story nationally, ten major American corporate advertisers have pulled their accounts from Rob, Arnie & Dawn in the Morning on KRXQ 98.55 in Sacramento.
For its part, the station has taken the May 28th broadcast down off the station’s public website and removed its list of advertisers and sponsors.
On the day in question, two of the show’s three hosts, Rob Williams and Arnie States, spent approximately thirty minutes of the segment berating transgender children as “idiots,” “freaks,” and “freaks of nature,” who were “just out for attention.” They compared the children to “fat bastard kids on Maury” who just needed to be put in their places with verbal abuse and even physical punishment if necessary. States said that if he had a male child who put on a pair of high heels, he would discipline him by striking the little boy with his own shoe.
“I’m going to go, ‘You know what? You’re a little idiot! You little dumbass!” he seethed, later addng, “I look forward to the day when [the transgender children] go out into society and society beats them down. And they wind up in therapy.” If the transgender-identified child “gets to eighteen,” States urged, throw them out of the house. “You say, ‘Get out! Go be a freak! And understand, SON, that society will never accept you because we will have some moral judgment.”
Apparently a significant chunk of corporate America also has “some moral judgment,” and, in this case, they decided that Rob, Arnie & Dawn’s in the Morning’s abusive tirade against transgender children, some as young as five, crossed the line.
As of this writing, at least ten national companies have withdrawn, cancelled, or decided not to renew their advertising contracts with KRXQ. They include Chipotle restaurants, the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, SONIC, Verizon, the Carl’s Jr. restaurant chain, Wells Fargo, Nissan, AT&T, and McDonalds. Citing the depravity of the content, spokespeople for the various companies were united in their disgust with KRXQ and Rob, Arnie, & Dawn in the Morning.
A statement sent to GLAAD from the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group read, “We found the segment to be offensive, and as a result we are pulling our Snapple advertising from the station.” The sentiment was echoed by SONIC, who asserted flatly that “SONIC in no way condones violence toward children and does not wish to be associated with media content that condones or promotes such activity in any way.” See KRXQ Sacramento Radio Hosts Have History of Obscenity Involving Children: FCC Report
Michael Rowe, 06.06.2009
Award-winning journalist and author of Other Men’s Sons
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Remembering Bea Arthur, feminist TV pioneer
There are lots of reasons to take a moment this weekend to mark the passing of Bea Arthur, who died on Saturday at age 86 in her home in Los Angeles. The most obvious was that she was talented and hilarious, and that if you are over the age of 30 in this country, there’s a good chance that she made you laugh on a semi-regular basis at some point in your life.
But it’s also important to remember that before “Dollhouse,” before “Sex and the City,” there was “Maude.” The “All in the Family” spin-off, which ran from 1972 to 1978, starred Arthur as Maude Findlay, the Democratic-voting, women’s liberation-supporting, four times married cousin of Edith Bunker. The program, created by television visionary Norman Lear, made the news early in its run for featuring prime time’s first abortion, in a two-part episode that aired two months before Roe v. Wade made abortion legal across the country.
Seven years after “Maude,” Arthur starred in “The Golden Girls” as Dorothy Zbornak, the divorced retiree who shared a home in Florida with three other women, including her aged mother. It’s remarkable to think, given how young, glossy and pneumatic network television has become, that less than 20 years ago, the airwaves were given over to four older women who talked about sex and ex-husbands and ate cheesecake.
Many others have observed that “The Golden Girls” was “Sex and the City” before “Sex and the City,” or alternately that the “Sex and the City” ladies were only a few decades away from drinks on the lanai themselves. The show was one of the most female-friendly and respectful looks at the experience of aging while female ever broadcast on national airwaves, simply by showing women — living, talking, having sex, making friends, cracking wise, living full lives together with energy and engagement. And if you happen to catch one of the reruns that still air, chances are good you’ll laugh your ass off.
So here’s to Bea Arthur, one of television’s finest and funniest feminists.
Remembering Bea Arthur, feminist TV pioneer
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