CBS has canceled the Ronald Reagan mini-series on their network and it will now be shown over on Showtime. For those of you who missed it, the synopsis of the story goes like this. CBS buys/approves a script for a Ronald Reagan biography/mini-series. The mini-series gets made and early warning for the film starts ruffling Republican feathers because "Reaganites" everywhere are upset with the film's portrayal of Nancy and Ronnie. CBS head honcho Les Moonves looks to get the thing edited so he can salvage his special, but eventually decides to dump it over on Showtime instead of putting it on CBS. The ultimate motives for him moving the special are the points of controversy. People are understandably questioning what line of thinking went into the ultimate decision to dump it.
There are a few different viewpoints on this that I would like to explore. A lot of people are crying censorship and are very upset about it. Some people are happy because as it has been alleged that some of the quotes and portrayals that were put on-screen are simply not true. Others are not happy because with the way the FCC is controlling the markets, people feel that CBS made the decision based on wanting to capitalize further in the media market monopolies. Ultimately this has gotten very ugly, and it really didn't need to.
The people who have it most correct so far are the people complaining about the FCC market media monopolies. As the FCC is continuing to shape ownership rules and laws for large conglomerates, CBS feels inclined to avoid controversy because they don't want to give the FCC any reason to hate them. This is all a part of the dangers of having too few controlling interests in charge of the various media outlets around the country. These are ulterior motives for creating and showing programming and it is obvious how easily it could get out of control. Who pays this price ultimately? We, the consumers eventually have such a sanitized filtered product on television and especially in television news that we can't possibly ever expect to know what's really going on by watching TV. Scary.
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Another point of contention is what Showtime is not cutting out, which is the repeated implication that Reagan had Alzheimer's as far back as 1985, which has zero proof to back it up.