Word: telethons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...were trying to buy gravitas with high-tech gadgets. The screens dripped data--a list of states running down the side, graphics spanning the bottom, a "virtual Senate" materializing on CNN. Even the pundits metastasized: the networks had banks upon banks of them, lined up like operators at a telethon. Look at all this information! the screens screamed. Look at all this analysis! Never mind that we're sitting on the news...
...performance by cancer survivor Melissa Etheridge and a film by Errol Morris (who produced Standard Operating Procedure, an acclaimed documentary about Abu Ghraib abuses). "I will make you laugh," says Ziskin, who produced the show. "I will definitely make you cry." But so, too, would any name-your-disease telethon...
...that meant leading the charge as a young teen to oust a teacher she considered abusive. Suffering from a congenital neuromuscular disease and bound to a wheelchair, Johnson resented assumptions about her quality of life. She railed against the "pity-based tactics" of the Jerry Lewis muscular dystrophy telethon, challenged a prominent Princeton professor on the ethics of euthanizing disabled infants and spoke out in defense of the brain-damaged Terri Schiavo when her case polarized the nation on the right-to-life debate. An accomplished writer who punctuated her arguments with sardonic humor, Johnson penned numerous articles...
Nothing makes a TV executive queasier than the word telethon. Jerry Lewis' efforts have done wondrous things, no doubt, for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, but as entertainment, they're must-flee TV. So when Simon Fuller, American Idol's creator and sovereign, told Fox executives he wanted to give one week of his prime-time, never-fail, hitmaking show over to fund raising--to make it a sort of telethon--he knew what they were thinking, and it was a word...
...four-day "coronation," as right-wing wags have dubbed it? The events themselves are hardly ostentatious: there's a mass, a tea, and prayer service. The most raucous thing on the schedule is a concert by Tony Bennett. Add a tote bag and it'd be a PBS telethon. Indeed, the demographic-pleasing tenor of the events reeks of a self-conscious desire to highlight all soft-focus interest groups that come with the Pelosi package: Italian, female, Catholic, grandmother. With so many facets illuminated, perhaps Pelosi's people are hoping no one notices what's been left...