Media Ricochet

The discordent reaction the Elite Media has had to certain recent movies with huge Red State audiences are a pretty good sense of how out of touch the legacy media really is. For the latest example (found via Tigerhawk) just look at United 93:

So has anyone in my newsroom been to see “United 93”? You’ve got to be kidding. The people who lined up two and three times for “Fahrenheit 9/11” are made visibly uncomfortable by this film. They seem to just wish it would go away.

Just this past Christmas, there was Narnia:

Because here in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America – that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right. I once heard the famous preacher Norman Vincent Peale in New York expound a sermon that reassured his wealthy congregation that they were made rich by God because they deserved it. The godly will reap earthly reward because God is on the side of the strong. This appears to be CS Lewis’s view, too. In the battle at the end of the film, visually a great epic treat, the child crusaders are crowned kings and queens for no particular reason. Intellectually, the poor do not inherit Lewis’s earth.

Does any of this matter? Not really. Most children will never notice. But adults who wince at the worst elements of Christian belief may need a sickbag handy for the most religiose scenes. The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw gives the film five stars and says, “There is no need for anyone to get into a PC huff about its Christian allegory.” Well, here’s my huff.

OK, to be fair, that was from England’s Guardian, not an American publication. But it’s a pretty safe bet that loads of people in big city newsrooms felt much the same way. As Andy Rooney said of The Passion of the Christ, the first post-9/11 to really show the divergence between Red State audiences and Blue Media:

“I’m not going to spend $9 just for a few laughs”

And just to bring this post full circle, here’s a reminder of the reviews that 23 critics wrote in 2004 about both The Passion and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Try to guess which film they gushed over, and which one they loathed.