Tuesday, December 11, 2007

NBC and the Thanking the Troops Ads

Last week NBC made the news by refusing to run a pair of ads that thank the troops for keeping us safe. Their reason? The ads ended with a web address and NBC found the web site too radical. I've looked at the web site. You have to look under "issues" to find anything and even that is pretty mild. Either NBC feels that policies supported by several Republican candidates are too radical or they were looking for an excuse to keep from running anything that looked pro-troop. Neither reflects well on NBC.

The whole thing backfired. The rejection got out which informed a lot more people about the ads than simply running them would have done. Freedoms Watch got more than its money's worth and NBC looks bad.

What about the ads themselves? I found them touching. This is what "supporting the troops" means.

Not so Huffington Poster, Michael Shaw. Where you or I might just see someone standing with a skyline at his back, he sees hidden messages.

About two-thirds of the way through, there is a cozy scene of the Manhattan skyline at sunset, this "thank you" offered by a man in a dark blue scarf. In the scene, the man's right shoulder angles down but his left shoulder, which is more straight, serves to highlight where the Trade Towers used to stand. In the center of the screen, moving left to right, is a jetliner flying away from the area. After a "Thank you" is uttered by an actor in the preceding segment, blue scarf guy finishes off the phrase with the words: "for keeping us safe...." With the plane flying past the scene of the attack, the implication is that the actions of U.S. soldiers have somehow made it possible for planes (as well as the rest of us) to successfully "get past" Ground Zero.

How clever - the man's posture was chosen specially to point to something that isn't there. Worse - there is an airplane visible in the background!!! That could never happen in the skies over New York!

And the implication that the military somehow keeps us safe? How dastardly!

Someone needs to "get past" Ground Zero and it isn't Freedoms Watch.

It is too bad that the left is so polarized and anti-military that a straightforward thank you to the troops is dissected like this.

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