Monthly Archives: May 2011
Why haven’t we heard from any of Lara Logan’s rescuers? (2/17)
Why no one wants to question Lara Logan’s fishy one-source story. (2/21)
What the Lara Logan press release should have said. (2/22)
Egyptians: Really into pinching. (2/23)
Journalist witness: Logan not sexually assaulted. (3/2)
One thing I do like about Lightweight Lara Logan. (5/21)
“Coming forward:” How newsworthy is sexual assault, really? (5/23)
It’s pretty cool that we’ve advanced to the point where a 40-year-old woman can still make it as a bimbo. It’s great that I’m able to have this argument without being accused of being an old hag picking on some 25-year-old. Lara Logan is 40!
Society, medical care, nutrition, and makeup sure have come a long way.
It has become a widespread belief in some circles that our smaller-population states are pampered with outsized representation in the Senate (and, to a lesser extent, the Electoral College and the House of Representatives – though in actuality the best and least represented states in the House both have one rep). While this is true, without these mechanisms these states would be outright ignored. Even in the current system, the larger states arguably have undue influence. Even when a state like Montana or New Mexico is up for grabs, presidential candidates aren’t going to spend a whole lot of time there. Even though California and Texas are not up for grabs, Republicans will spend some time in the former and Republicans in the latter for fundraising reasons alone.
Of course, the complaints are not without merit. If you look at donor and beneficiary states, you see not only the red/blue distinction that many comment on, but an urban/rural distinction as well (the major exception being the rust belt). It’s a fair point. Also worth noting, however, is that in some cases it just costs more on a per-capita basis to service a large and sparse state than a primarily urban one. So if Wyoming is getting its mail, and New York is getting its mail, but on a per-tax-dollar basis the former costs a lot more than the latter, they’re not exactly getting a freebie. As Americans, they’re getting the same services as their urban counterparts because they, like their urban counterparts, are Americans and thus due the same services. The same goes for roads. It was Washington DC that drew the map for Montana. Should Washington then complain that it costs so much to service Montana’s roads in comparison to Rhode Island’s?
It also overlooks the fact that these states are often getting this money in return for a service. Surely, we wouldn’t consider a NASA engineer* to be the moral equivalent of someone getting federal food stamps, would we? But when people talk about beneficiary and donor states, they often fail to make these distinctions. Further, it’s advantageous not just to North Dakota’s economy, but also the United States government when we put nuclear silos there rather than upstate New York because it’s cheaper. The same goes for Nevada* and Utah accepting nuclear waste, because it’s safer (except for Nevada and Utah, that is). And military bases in Kansas instead of California. It wouldn’t save the government any money to put these in any of the donor states. It’s not unlike saying that my car mechanic is a “beneficiary” because I pay him for goods and services and he doesn’t pay me (directly) for any.
Of course, you can even put these aside and you’ll probably still also find a disparity. Partially due to per-capita income, but also because rural states do exploit the senate in order to get earmarks and the like. I am not wholly unsympathetic to the undemocratic nature of it.
But the big states gain from the fact that they have larger congressional delegations. And so they have natural alliances that they can then use to get outsized influence. It’s easier for eleven reps in Chicago to team up than the sole representatives from Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas to team up with the two reps in Idaho, the three in Utah and Nebraska even if they represent roughly the same population. Further, even under the current system, the big states get almost all of the presidents.
The last 13 Presidents have come from Illinois*, Texas, Arkansas, Texas, California, Georgia, Michigan, California, Texas, Massachusetts. Kansas, Missouri, New York. Clinton is exceptional and Eisenhower’s base was the mighty US Army rather than sparsely-populated Kansas. All the others come from one of the 20 most-populous states.
So too do most defeated Presidential nominees. Since FDR beat Wendell Wilkie the losers have come from: Arizona, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Kansas, Texas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Georgia, Michigan, South Dakota, Minnesota, Arizona, California, Illinois, New York.
Note the paucity of small-state nominees. Arizona wasn’t a major state when Goldwater ran while Bob Dole (Kansas), Mondale (Minnesota), McGovern (South Dakota) and Humphrey (Minnesota) were each Washington figures. If it’s tough to win the Presidency from the Senate it’s even harder to do so as a former governor of a small state.
Clinton, again, is the only ex-governor to reach the White House from one of the 30 least-populous states. Those states account for roughly 25% of the population and, obviously, 60% of governors and yet they produce very few successful candidates.
There are some good reasons for that: what works in a small state may not scale to national level and, just as importantly, the governor of a small state lacks names recognition in major media markets and, rather importantly, in major media newsrooms. Sure, you might have done a good job in your tiny, empty state thousands of miles from Washington but that means nothing on the national stage and it certainly doesn’t earn you the right to be taken seriously by sagacious pundits and handicappers.
All of this is more than compensated for by Senate representation, of course, and the electoral college benefit the senate seats give the small states (Al Gore would have won in 2000 is the EC counts had been determines solely by House representation).
Now (leaving aside for the moment the Chicago vs UT-ID-MT-WY-ND-SD-NE equation), in a perfectly democratic system, the response would be “screw the small states because they’re such a pitiful minority. If you want more representation, move!” But while we live in a democracy, we do not live under one whose primary goal is to represent the view of a majority of the people to the exclusion of everyone else. The states were designed to mean something. Maybe you consider them anachronistic, and in a sense maybe they are. But while you can argue “the founders never accounted for the kind of population differential you see between California and Wyoming”, it’s also the case that the initial compromise did intend for their to be disparities.
Of course, I am not an unbiased observer in this, seeing as how I live in a small state with outsized senate representation. But the same “move!” argument made above can be made here. If it’s that important to you, you’re more than free to join me in Arapaho. If you are disinclined to because of the lack of job opportunities or city amenities, than just consider it a bone thrown our way: We get maintained roads and mail service, too.
* – Florida (NASA), Texas (NASA), and Nevada (nuclear waste) are actually donor states. You get the point, though.
Please, commenters, criticism should be informed of the entire post and supporting links. I refuse to be exhausted by repetition. Comments that force me to repeat prior statements, or that are personally abusive, or that praise her without adding to the debate, will be deleted. Those are all typical tricks of the crazed (male) Logan fans who scan the Internet for criticism of her. I left the No. 2 comment up as a good example.
Finally got around to reading the transcript of Lara Logan’s CBS “60 Minutes” interview about her alleged, fishy “brutal and sustained sexual assault” in Tahrir Square. Sorry, I’ve got kids. They take up time. And I knew this would really piss me off. It’s even worse than I thought. Lara Logan is cold scheming evil, in a “To Die For”/”Wild Things” kind of way.
Before I get to the worst con she’s pulled, by the way, know who doesn’t have kids? Lara Logan. She has one child. [Edit: A kind commenter draws my attention to the fact that her Wikipedia bio is not up to date, and she apparently popped out two kids one year after the other. She must have an indulgent boss. The facts as to her adulterous, suspiciously well-timed “accidental” pregnancy, however, are correct.] So why did she keep going on how she kept thinking of her “children”during this unwitnessed (and counter-witnessed!), so-called brutal sexual attack? Well, you see, Logan has a stepdaughter. When Logan got pregnant with her one and only child, her current husband was married to another woman. That’s the woman whose husband she stole’s child, not Logan’s. That girl’s mother is still alive, you know, notwithstanding that when she got the news of Logan’s very convenient “accidental” pregnancy (yeah, sure, a childless late-30s professional having an affair with a married man gets “accidentally” pregnant with his baby she keeps) she reportedly went to the hospital with an overdose. I wonder how that poor woman feels watching this cheater claim her daughter on national TV. The underling reporter who did the interview surely knew Logan’s biographical details, so when he said “your daughter and your son,” that had to be at her instruction.
Such a well-timed interview, so well-calculated for one last big burst of public sympathy and publicity. Done just when Logan’s first fix of publicity had died down, and she’d almost been eclipsed by real, honest reporter/assault victims like Lynsey Addario. No Obama phone call for Addario, though. No poster-girl status. And … not a single person questioning or disputing Addario’s credible, unsensationalized account of her mistreatment at the hands of her Libyan captors. And conveniently done just as Logan, whose only real professional asset is her appearance, turns 40 — getting very close to the age of the superior but older female reporter who was fired for her several years ago. Suddenly, women feel we have to sympathize with Logan.
Frankly, it’s scary that CBS would let this go on. What happened to critical reporting? What happened to “If your mother says she loves, you, check it out?” It just doesn’t seem to matter that there were eyewitnesses who dispute Logan’s account — and, more importantly, three months later, still not a single witness who supports it other than Logan herself. Not one supporting witness to support her claim that there was a 20 to 30 minute attack where chunks of hair were ripped out of her scalp, she was raped with hands (as she put it), and stripped naked in public. The only witnesses to any harassment at all, ironically, were people who said it didn’t appear that much was going on, at worst she may have been groped over her clothes, and she was protected by a chain of male volunteers. There were no women around when she got to the soldiers. Even without the disputing witness acounts, Logan’s counter-story just sounds like so much melodramatic Hollywood hogwash:
Logan: And I almost fell into the lap of this woman on the ground who was head to toe in black, just her eyes, I remember just her eyes, I could see.
Pelley: Wearing a chador.
Logan: Yes. And she put her arms around me. And oh my God, I can’t tell you what that moment was like for me. I wasn’t safe yet, because the mob was still trying to get at me. But now it wasn’t just about me anymore. It was about their women and that was what saved me, I think. The women kind of closed ranks around me.
Where are these saintly female saviors? How come there weren’t any witnesses interviewed for this segment, except a brief bit from her producer, who doesn’t seem to provide any support for the story except that Logan seemed very upset, like a “rag doll”? Why don’t we get to hear from “Ray,” the former special forces security guy who should be able to support her account of being stripped naked? All we get is Logan’s interviewer commenting that “Ray” said her sleeve was torn from her coat (probably by Ray himself, because he was supposedly holding that sleeve in a death grip). And how is it no one claims to have seen those cell phone photos Logan claims people were taking? Where is anyone who witnessed or took part in this gory, protracted attack and dramatic rescue?
Why did Scott Pelley ask Logan absolutely nothing about the fact that eyewitness accounts seem to dispute her story? It would have been so easy, and it could have been done without being mean. “You’ve probably heard that there were others in the square who claim they saw you there, and that it didn’t seem to them you were being sexually attacked.” I mean, they don’t have to actually interview Mexican photojournalist Temoris Grecko (and here’s his response to her interview, as well as to her crazed fans who wanted his head on a platter for reporting what he and others saw), but at least ask Logan something that gives her a chance to respond to his account of the incident, and the accounts of other eyewitnesses he quoted. It’s irresponsible not to give someone a chance to respond to that. Unless you know they don’t have a decent response.
Logan isn’t brave. She was treated with kid gloves in this interview, just as she’s been treated with kid gloves across the media. There’s nothing brave about a press release, and there’s nothing brave about keeping quiet for three months while the people you conned wring their hands over you, then telling your story your way to someone who won’t question a damned thing. It’s the most cowardly way she could have handled it. It’s the way someone acts when they’re lying.
Yes, Logan conned me and is still conning a lot of other people, and I’m frothing mad about it. So let’s go to someone who can discuss this unemotionally: “DC Dave,” (I found him at Female Faust’s post on the subject. We women do get emotional about sexual assault.) here:
Filming and reporting had gone just fine for about an hour before the camera battery went down, we are told for the first time. This is a convenient way of dealing with my question in part 1 as to why we had not been shown any pictures of what happened subsequent to the one picture we have been shown over and over of Logan looking concerned in the crowd’s midst. [Sheila says: I disagree that she looked concerned in that photo, she had a small smile and just appeared to be looking at something.]
They may have addressed the one-photo criticism—however implausibly—but they provide no explanation for their four-day reporting delay. They also have no explanation for the last-minute redundant coverage of the Tahrir Square celebration by 60 Minutes in this era of financial hardship by the news networks. CBS already had its live coverage of the event. What was the 60 Minutes story to have been in the absence of the “sexual assault?”
They do have an explanation as to how the group of rescuing Egyptian women came upon the scene. The attacking melee was somehow “swept along” until it encountered this knot of local women in the crowd. Only then, we are told, did things begin to change for the better.
What really cries out for better explanation in this new version of events is how the six-man crew failed so utterly to protect Logan. Before, with the “got separated” story, one could imagine terrible things perhaps happening to Logan that the crew knew nothing about. The scene as now painted, though, has the menace arriving with their full knowledge, and Logan, the one person the crew was there to guard, was somehow culled out by the mob. Had I been interviewing McClellan I would not have wanted so much to hear about Logan’s wounds; I would have wanted to hear about his wounds.
It is perhaps significant that the producer of this latest 60 Minutes piece was none other than Robert Anderson. This is the same person who, in the Vince Foster case, put the following complete lie into the mouth of Mike Wallace: “The forensic evidence shows that the fatal bullet had been fired into Foster’s mouth from the gun found in Foster’s hand and that Foster’s thumb had pulled the trigger.” (See the appendix to Part 6 of “America’s Dreyfus Affair.”)
…
Notice the contrast in journalistic professionalism between this account and what we have been told by CBS and the Murdoch news organs. Grecko names his witnesses and tells you something about each, making it easier to check his story out. CBS didn’t even give us the name of the hospital in New York City where Logan was supposedly sent for several days. It certainly makes you wonder if there really was any such hospital to name.
If [Temoris] Grecko’s is the correct account, which to this observer has a much greater ring of truth, what CBS did with its four-day reporting delay was not to hatch a story out of whole cloth, but to figure out a way to put their propaganda spin on the story. The real story would have done nothing for the larger mission of the U.S. mainstream press, which these days no doubt includes addressing the growing Zionist propaganda crisis …
My favorite line is the last:
A human chain of young men protecting the mildly harassed accused Israeli agent, Lara Logan, just wouldn’t do.
But it looks like Logan and CBS will all get away with it. The story tells too many people what they want to believe.
And that’s why CBS won’t fire her, even if a big media outlet finally picks up the real story and she’s exposed. Her superiors were in on it.
Five myths about church and state. A lot of these “five myths” are kind of questionable in their conclusions, but they almost always have some interesting background information in them.
I think that culturally and politically, we have greater things to worry about than the death of cursive. Cursive was devised in part to save time. Now it’s slower than typing. It’s largely redundant. And is difficult to read when people write sloppy. And since people spend more time typing than writing, they write sloppy.
Mitt Romney’s health care plan (which served as a blueprint for President Obama and the PPACA) was supposed to save money by cutting down on ER visits, but it hasn’t, presumably because insurance has lead more people to seek ER care that they might have declined otherwise. Likewise, wait lists to see general practitioners are up. As long as we have the shortage of primary care docs, the system is going to be hard-pressed to reduce reimbursements. They can choose their own patients. Also, “fear of lawsuits” is mentioned as a cost-driver for ERs. Another issue, though, are demanding patients/parents.
In kind of a creepy story, the New York Times interviewed a Neo-Nazi who was killed the following week by his son, also interviewed, who was showing off his new soon-to-be murder weapon the day before.
Man gets injured riding ATV on a defunct theme park’s property. Man sues theme park property owner. Man wins theme park in judgment.
Brits try to understand why we’re upset about our low gas prices. Low, of course, compared to theirs. We sort of wonder why they’re so okay with it.
Drunkeness is again a legal defense of criminal activity in Canada. This goes to the root of a conflict in law enforcement. Sometimes the law is served best by imprisoning people that are arguably not accountable for their actions. Whether drunkenness falls into this category is up for debate, of course, but if being drunk means you can’t consent to sex, why would you still be responsible for your actions? At the same time, though, someone that gets drunk and rapes people needs to be put away.
Austin, Texas, is looking at sweeping changes to improve performance, including more hours, “teacher accountability”, and an extended school year if they can scrounge up the money. Some are suggesting that the longer hours mean that this is just another sign of schools-as-daycare. To some extent, perhaps, but when it comes to failing schools, I am all in favor of trying new things. Our school days and school years are pretty short, by international standards. And for a lot of these kids, there really are worse places that they can spend their time.
Schools are considering banning chocolate milk over added sugar. I am of a mixed mind on this. On the one hand, it’s the lesser of a few evils. On the other hand, added sugar. I lean more towards the former, not making perfect the enemy of the good. It seems to me that a solution might be leaving students with the choice of chocolate skim or unflavored 2% or something like that.
War dogs! More war dogs! War studs!
The University of Massachusetts Minutemen are making the transition to the highest football subdivision in the NCAA (FBS). They will start playing in the Mid-American Conference next year and will be eligible for bowl games the year after that. They presently play in the Colonial Athletic Association, the top conference in the next tier down. The MAC is one of the two weakest conferences in the FBS division (along with the Sun Belt Conference, and soon to be joined by the WAC) and is arguably worse than the CAA. They should do well.
I find the decision to be quite puzzling. First, UMass is sitting pretty where they are. Their current football conference has them playing like-universities in the University of Maine, University of New Hampshire, and University of Delaware. Their new conference schedule will consist mostly of second-tier schools with directional and city-state schools. They tout the fact that they will be receiving TV money, but the MAC’s TV contract is pretty week in comparison to other non-BCS conferences such as the Mountain West Conference and Conference USA. Further, they don’t have a stadium to play in and will have to be playing 95 minutes away, in Foxborough. Further, it’s going to cost them money in terms of scholarships (an additional 22) and Title IX requirements (they’ll have to add spending to women’s athletics to approximately equal that of men’s, so new sports most likely).
All for a chance to play in the MAC?
They are essentially making the same decision that Temple did*. Temple also plays in the MAC for football and the A-10 for everything else. There really aren’t any other entry-level conferences in the northeast. The only two conferences, the Big East and the ACC, are BCS-level. The Big East has been known to make offers to FCS schools with Connecticut and more recently Villanova**, but it’s a pretty big leap. Presumably, the Big East is what UMass ultimately has in mind. But the MAC is not a comfortable place to be in the interim. One thing I thought that Conference USA, the best of the non-BCS conferences with a presence east of the Mississippi, should consider is expanding northward along the east coast with UMass, Temple, and a couple others (Delaware, New Hampshire, and/or maybe a Virginia school or two). The problem, from the perspective of UMass and Temple, is that they would have to leave the Atlantic 10 for other sports. The A-10 is not an FBS conference (their membership makes up half of CAA football), but it has a sterling basketball reputation that C-USA lacks. It appears likely that the MAC is looking to take over that area and – unlike Conference USA – is willing to accept football-only memberships to do it.
Another puzzling decision is Nebraska-Omaha. They’re moving up from Division II to Division I FCS. They’re doing so at the cost of their very successful football program, which they have to can due to a combination of the increased expenses of Division I and Title IX requirements. I can definitely understand the desire to move up from Division II (particularly after the relatively nearby Dakota schools all made the jump), but the expense of their marquee sport is an awfully high price to pay.
* – A big difference, though, is that Temple was already in FBS and was without a conference after having been kicked out of the Big East. So the MAC decision made more sense to them as the best of a lot of bad options, once they were turned down by Conference USA.
** – Villanova is apparently taking a pass. Like UMass, they lack an acceptable football stadium.
Below is the entire conversation, but the part that I am pointing to is here. The case for Chris Christie or Haley Barbour running as fat men.
My own sometimes-defenses of the obese aside, I do think that there is value in being a role model, and so in that sense Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich provide a better role model of sorts (err, as it pertains to weight, in the case of the latter). But I do consider it sad commentary that Christie’s weight did become an issue in the campaign. Whether deserved or not, the reputation of fat men is that they are lazy or undisciplined. Both Christie and Barbour have entire biographies that disprove this as it applies to them (regardless of whether one agrees with their policy positions or not).
On a sidenote, it’s odd that all four candidates mentioned are Republicans. Are there any really fat – or formerly fat – Democrats out there? Montana has a governor a little on the hefty side, and Maryland has Barbara Mikulski, but nobody else really comes to mind and nobody is talking about them for president. Al Gore? Bill Richardson? Neither were huge when they were public figures, by my recollection (though Gore got pretty heavy for a while after he lost). But most that come to mind are Republicans. Denny Hastert. A local congressman back home. Coincidence, or something to do with the female vote in the primaries?
There was actually a candidate for congress back in Delosa whose web-site had clearly photo-shopped his head. Actually, it was a pretty good photoshop job that just didn’t survive scrutiny. Up to that point he was actually considered a serious candidate. He wasn’t even that overweight.
The case for prosecuting nonthreatening criminals. I’ve noticed a weird uptick in people who believe that our prison-industrial complex thrives off of imprisoning non-violent offenders and yet the same person also expressing outrage that those responsible for the economic meltdown are not in prison.
“Too soon,” is what they say. In light of the death of an Alabama player, ESPN immediately launches into speculation of who on the team this is good and bad for. The Onion had a great video on a shooting spree in Ohio where they talleyed up how many of the deceased were McCain voters and how many were Obama voters instead of focusing on the carnage. I looked for it, but I can’t find it for the life of me.
Even we Episcopalians have standards. Incidentally, a former pastor at my church was caught cheating on his wife with a perishoner (long after he left our church) and was booted out of the church. He’s now running services for… The Catholic Church. In any event, I don’t think the Episcopal Church does a very good job of picking off Catholics, but cases like McGreevey are a bit of an embarrassment.
The hyperwhiteness of nerdity.
Do we have a post-ownership future? I have mixed thoughts on how desirable – or not – this is. On the one hand, the flexibility that comes with renting rather than owning could serve us well. On the other hand, a society in which a small slice owns everything is not exactly desirable. One of the strongest indictments of capitalism is ironically something I typically hear Republicans say: don’t just work for your money, make your money work for you.
A brief story linked to by Transplanted Lawyer involving death, forgiveness, and voicemail.
A vaccine for HIV? A cure for cancer?* Or not.
Ashton Kutcher for Two and a Half Men? I’m a little surprised that he went for it, but I can’t imagine a safer choice. A pretty safe choice, really. Interesting to TAAHM’s core demographics, but not really risky in any way.
Some people think that Taco Bell is going too far with its counter-campaign against the (already lost) lawsuit against their meat product. I think that they’re just taking advantage of a great opportunity. They actually use beef. People didn’t know this. Not for sure. Take it and run with it, I say.
* – I actually have quite a bit to say on the tone of the article. Debating whether HC is the forum in which to say it.
Generally speaking, I dislike songs about being a musician. Clever artists can incorporate their experiences into something more universal or unique (my favorite has one about being a traveling salesman). Beyond being a classic and probably among the early examples of this kind of song, this one holds up. Oddly, Joel has two such songs. I can’t think of any artist (“The Entertainer” being the other) with two songs about being a musician that I actually like.
I have to confess, John at the Bar does not look at all like I had envisioned him. Davey who is still in the Navy totally does, though.
Man, the aesthetics of the 80’s will never stop being obnoxious.
I wonder if anyone smokes cigarettes in music videos anymore.
At some point while I wasn’t looking, the Cartoon Network canceled Batman: The Brave and the Bold. The basic gyst of the show followed the former comic book by that name, the Batman Plus format. Each episode had Batman teaming up with another hero in the DC Universe. The Batman in this show was notably different from other depictions insofar as Batman was, if not as campy as the Alan West version, far from dark and brooding. As someone that prefers darker interpretations of the character, I had no interest in it. But they had an episode featuring Ted Kord as the Blue Beetle, which I had to see. Ted Kord was, for copyright reasons, banned from television until after the character was killed off in the comic books. So it was my only real chance to see a cartoon version of the character. It turned out that the show was really quite enjoyable. Enjoyable enough that I was able to put my biases regarding Bruce Wayne aside.
They’re going to be featuring a new Batman cartoon at some point in the near future, with the more dark interpretation. I, of course, plan on watching it. Their last pre-BTBATB effort, The Batman, was pretty disappointing. It’s hard to measure up to The Animated Series, though. BTBATB managed to do so primarily by being so different.
While I enjoyed the show, and lament its passing, I have mixed feelings about certain aspects of it. It was indicative of a larger problem within the Warner Bros. media empire. Namely, it lacked synergy with the comic books. It seems as though DC and WB has gone out of its way to disassociate the two. When Bruce Wayne is starring in a string of successful movies, they take him out of the costume in the comics. They make a super-successful show about Clark Kent, but make it somewhat irreconcilable with the comic books. They have a Birds of Prey TV show… set in a post-apocalyptic Gotham. I’m not saying that what’s going on in the comic books ought to correspond with what’s going on in the movies and on television, but they should be at least some coordination. The characters in the comic need to be at least somewhat reconcilable and familiar. Otherwise, people watching a movie or a TV show who ventures to pick up a comic book will find themselves reading something entirely different than the product that they enjoyed enough to lead them there in the first place.
Superheroes have never been bigger and yet the comic book market continues to struggle. DC in particular. Some of this is simply due to differences within the companies (DC has a certain progression that Marvel lacks, wherein sidekicks grow up and become heroes and so on). But while Marvel has at least kept its eye on the synergistic ball enough to pitch the comic books in movies, Warner Bros seems to be worried about some sort of anti-trust violation if they so much as mention that a comic book exists. DC did come close to getting it right several years ago with an obvious tie-in to the Batman and Superman animated serials, but didn’t do as good a job getting those comic books in non-direct markets (such as convenience stores and pharmacies) as they could have. Or maybe they did try, but never was it mentioned to people watching the cartoon that they could get further adventures in comic book form.
Anyhow, The Brave and the Bold was indicative of this problem. In one sense, it almost transcended it by introducing viewers to characters that they otherwise would never hear about (Red Tornado, the new the Blue Beetle, etc.). But it did so at the expense of the characters that they would see if they went to the nearest comic book shop and picked up Green Lantern, seeing Hal Jordan instead of Guy Gardner. And it featured a Batman unrecognizable in comic form.
As it stands, DC is sitting on over half of the best-known superheroes in comic books today. And yet their sales are dwarfed by Marvel. Some of this is due to Marvel being more in-tune with die-hard collector preferences (more “mature” storylines, more grit, more cavalier treatment of characters) and some of it with Marvel putting out some pretty impressive movies. For years they put out lackluster movies because, until Marvel proved differently, they didn’t think it was important that they actually be any good. But they caught up. So maybe they’ll figure out the importance of synergy and enhancing the value of their properties rather than simply using them to make a quick buck.