Get a grip, Tampa Bay Community Network.
We haven’t seen it but we have seen the fish wrapper’s description of your spot that uses Hitler, Stalin and Castro to condemn Hillsborough County commissioners.
Gawwwd.
We’re all for community-access media but cutting it from the county budget in a lean year hardly constitutes an atrocity or tyranny, nor does it undermine free speech.
This budget cut doesn’t even warrant an opaque reference to Castro, much less Hitler and Stalin. Anyone who thinks it does should hurry back and study the rise of the Third Reich for starters. We’re talking about government-funded media here as opposed to privately owned media. This might surprise TBCN but totalitarian states essentially own and operate all media. Privately owned channels of dissent aren’t permitted. Preserving those and diversifying their ownership is what we need to worry about in this community.
But that’s just the beginning of TBCN’s inanity. It seems to think that it has an inalienable right to Hillsborough County tax dollars (a slightly fascist concept in its own right, don’t you think?). TBCN is actually spending money to sue the county for cutting its $355,000 budgetary line item. And get this; the ad in question is supposed to generate sympathy for the cause and raise money for TBCN’s legal fund.
Seriously. They want us to give them money so they can sue us to make us give them more money.
According to the fish wrapper: Louise Thompson, TBCN’s executive director, said the ad isn’t directly comparing the commissioners to the three dictators; it just makes the point that their regimes thrived when public discourse was stifled.
‘I think it’s hard-hitting, and it sends the message that we need to make sure we keep the public’s voice open,’ Thompson said.
No, Louise, actually it sends the message that you lack good judgment and a reasonable sense of proportion. Hitler, Stalin and Castro didn’t gain power for lack of tax-subsidized community-access cable. And the world in 2007 doesn’t require it to sustain healthy public discourse. We appreciate it but free speech can thrive without it.
Beyond that, TBCN’s ad seems unlikely to do much other than perhaps disgust those with a first-hand appreciation of Castro, Hitler and Stalin, and to inadvertently create sympathy for the objects of its shrill hyperbole.
Meantime, we’re inclined to think that TBCN needs a few grownups to help manage that thing.