This kind of thing happens all the time and nobody talks about it until a hiccup like this happens.
It smells like a new form of product placement, only in this case, it’s to NOT sell the product, or to put it another way, to help other people question buying it—to discredit it, in other words.
It seems to me like the writers and/or producers behind David E. Kelley’s “Boston Legal” show have it in for Fox News Channel. My wild guess is that they decided to plant the seed in the minds of Viewerland, U.S.A., that censoring it in schools could be at least a plausible option—because it is, yes, “biased” and “conservative”, rather than nice ‘n liberal which is perfectly acceptable, see.
Even if the story-line purports to be against the censorship of FNC, the seed is planted. That’s often how “marketing” works.
I don’t know this to be the case, as I said—it’s hard to tell without first seeing the episode, which doesn’t even air until Sunday. But from the story in the L.A. Times, that’s how it sounds to me.
And it’s an altogether plausible theory even if I do say so myself.
ABC Writes Out Fox
By Scott Collins, Times Staff WriterTV shows often feature plots ripped from the headlines, but an upcoming episode of David E. Kelley’s legal drama “Boston Legal” was a bit too lifelike for ABC executives.
Sunday’s episode of the series starring James Spader is about the censorship issues raised when a high school principal tries to block students’ access to a cable news channel. In Kelley’s original script, the network in question was News Corp.‘s Fox News Channel.
But that script didn’t pass muster with the standards department at Walt Disney Co.‘s ABC, which ordered Kelley to remove multiple references to Fox News.
The episode, titled “Let Sales Ring,” now avoids any mention of Fox but has characters referring to a network that is accused of pushing a conservative agenda, leaving it to viewers to make their own inferences. […]
It’s when you read this last paragraph that my theory may start to ring true.
ABC also rejected an ad for the DVD version of “Outfoxed,” an anti-Fox News documentary released last year. The distributor wanted to run the ad during “Boston Legal,” partly because the documentary is mentioned during Sunday’s episode. Brockman said the ad contained unacceptable content.
They do this all the time to Fox News Channel in Canada (yes, it’s now unbanned in Canada). The state-run CBC does what they make out to be a “news” story about Fox News Channel, which turns out to be nothing but abhorrent slam against the channel. The Globe & Mail’s TV reviewer slammed the heck out of it more than once as have other supposedly legitimate, objective “critics” in Canada. In the Vancouver Sun—in a NEWS story, not an editorial, they once described FNC as: “the ultra-right-wing champion of George W. Bush, big tax cuts and the war in Iraq”.
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