When it comes to explaining the roots of Kwanza, KNBC has no problem dedicating some time in their news broadcasts, a feat they failed to give to this history of Christmas yesterday. In today's 11am "Mid Day Report" KNBC cheerfully said this of the American-made seven day holiday:
African-Americans are beginning the celebration of Kwanza. A parade gets way at noon in LA's Crenshaw district. The seven-day long Kwanza holiday was founded back in 1966 as a way for African-Americans to reflect back on their ancestry and culture. It involves seven daily principals of unity, self-determination, work, responsibility, knowledge, strength, purpose, creativity, and faith. Participants in today's Kwanza parade will march down Crenshaw Blvd. from Adams to Vernon.LAist believes that that is good reporting. Despite the fact that there are only thousands of Los Angelenos who will celebrate Kwanza, KNBC announced the significance of this day and explained its history.
We only wonder why the news station didn't give Christmas the same sort of treatment, especially since it mentioned the word "Christmas" 30 times in it's 6 o'clock news last night, but never gave any of it's history or bothered to even utter the name of the man who Christmas is named for, Jesus Christ, whose birthday was celebrated by millions of Los Angelenos yesterday.
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I see no mention in the above that the founder of Kwanzaa is Ron Karenga. It's clear that KNBC refuses to say "Ron" or "Ron Karenga" on Christmas! If their argument is "everyone knows Ron Karenga founded Kwanzaa", we would argue back that everyone knew it was nice outside and yet the weather guy got a hearty amount of airtime to tell us just that.
The truth is the media has an extremely hard time allowing themselves to say the words Ron Karenga, and will allow that malfunction to get in the way of delivering the news.
And to prove how poorly KNBC has taught us about Kwanzaa, just look at how Tony Pierce has mis-spelled Kwanzaa throughout his post above. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwanzaa
You can drop the "we," you know... this looks bad on LAist, this is your personal crusade. Crusade being an especially good word for it. You've got all of the space on the web, but LAist isn't the place for it. Please, start your own blog, and I sincerely hope that someone reads it; but this isn't your own blog, this is part of the Gothamist blog. I read this blog to find out what's up with LA, not what's up with the culture wars.
This message you're repeating has gone on for three or four posts now and it has just stopped being funny. I read the first couple and that you were being subtle with your wit and I'm like.. 'that's cool, he's kinda got that british wit going for him' but now I think either you're actually being serious or you're dragging it out too long.
Give it up. You're making yourself look like an ignorant prick.
Additionally, I hope the LAist editors have the good sense to go the way of the mods at Chowhound.
Actually KNBC did cover various christmas parades in its evening newscasts. Coincidentally none of them occured on christmas day. Thus they didn't make the christmas day newscasts. Der.
Oh for Pete's sake I've had it...
Thanks Tony. Now that I have read not ONE but TWO, "Oh whoah to the Christians we are forever being prosecuted by the media, hollywood, or Kosher Delis" posts by you today, I now have one less RSS feed to read each day.
Unsubscribing now, I hope your bosses take note of your rants to loss subscriber ratio and can you.
zomg i was watching knbc on xmas + they didnt mention the cobrasnake 1ce not even 1ce teh whole day lol omgz
i counted teh wordz they used all day well i cant count that high but i did teh best i could + they said:
holiday
shopping
season
xmas
kwanza
travel
iraq
but not 1 time did they say cobrasnake or sheperd fairy zomg will teh senseless libaral media war on scensters never cease omg lawlz
the one thing that annoys me more than the faux persecution bullshit is all this "I'm gonna quit you" drama.
just quit reading or don't but that kinda drama has no place. it's all a little too knee jerk for my tastes.
So what if Matt Drudge works here now. So what if they essentially lead with the headline "This just in: TV News shallow and uninforming" on this the day of James Brown's demise. So what so what so what. Where's my TV Junkie?
My, folks are getting touchy. There are those who can accept certain beliefs, but not others? Sounds like a few repressed memories need to be confronted.
You go Tony, you're my new hero for pointing out TV news foibles. It's one of my favorite activities, too.
I second the other accusations that this Christmas critique of KNBC is quite lame.
was it christmas? is christmas really the day we celebrate jesus's birthday? i had absolutely no idea, since KNBC didn't tell me.
isn't it the job of a newscast to inform about the stuff we don't know or is new? (perhaps a good lead story is the death of an iconic celebrity. he's only died once. i'm pretty sure we have christmas every year and i'm also pretty sure it's always tied to this jesus guy.)
tony, i hate to say it, but you're coming across as a cranky lunatic. that's not good.
Oh no, someone please stop this Tony person from wasting any more space with his persecuted Christan ranting. If I wanted to read this propaganda I'd go to Bill O'Reilly or Ann Coulter's websites. Enough, already!
Here is where your troll blew a tire, slammed into a semi hauling Jaeger and burst into flames just before it crashed into the valley below. 0/10, sockfucker.
As you've said several times now, they mentioned the word "Christmas" 30 times... or the equivalent of once every minute in a half-hour newscast. That's not enough for you? It sounds like the dominant religion is still plenty dominant around here.
To Aaron (comment #2), we say "we" on LAist. As a contributor, I have no qualms with Tony saying this even though I hold a very different opinion. It's a style thing, and we enjoy it.
As for this post, we of the non-Tony opinion just want to point out that Kwanzaa is still a relatively new holiday that many people don't understand. We'd guess 97% of Angelinos know the story of Christmas, 30% know what temperature it was today, 20% know if there's supposed to be rain tomorrow, and 5% know the story of Kwanzaa.
Anyway, methinks Tony is smiling as he reads the comments and saying "gotcha!" On multiple levels.
TedSez,
That's a fair question. The fact that KNBC said "Christmas" 30 times only leads to the oddness that they didn't provide any history, background, or context to what they were saying once a minute.
It would be like mentioning the Rose Bowl parade once a minute without ever saying Pasadena, or talking about the 4th of July without ever saying "independence" or "America".
As you say, the dominant religion is very dominant around here, so why the fear of mentioning the dude's name whose birthday is the cause of the celebration yesterday?
Fair enough; Tony just may be saying "gotcha" on several levels. But I don't read LAist to be trolled by editors.
T.P. has the right to his opinion, if it's his opinion. And presumably he can take the thorough mocking that he is getting for it. But if it's not his opinion, and he's playing games, then I really will very likely stop reading LAist--not because anything anyone said offended me, but simply because I don't come to Gothamist websites to be fucked with.
Please start your own blog, and I sincerely hope that someone reads it...
hehehe. This made me laugh. I think Tony has quite a following.
i assure you, Dana, that KNBC said Christmas 30 times on Christmas and never once mentioned Jesus, the man whose birthday was being celebrated.
i have no idea what Adam is referring to when he assumes what my motivations were/are. My motivation and my job here is to tell the continuing tale of LA. Last night KNBC did something very unusual and it is my job to write it down.
I did it not because i had anything up my sleeve, but because i thought it was interesting. After seeing the comments here I now see why places like KNBC tap dance around religion even on religious holidays. They do it because of politics.
LAist and Gothamist has no politics which allows us to actually tell the news of the day. You should stop visiting us when we stop telling you what happened that day.
Happy Kwanza,
tp
Well Kwanzaa is a lot newer, and people don't know what it is. For the X-mas issue, there's a huge elephant in the room that no one wants to mention... everyone knows what it is but no one wants to say. At least Tony is asking questions.
For the X-mas issue, there's a huge elephant in the room that no one wants to mention... everyone knows what it is but no one wants to say.
More like: everyone knows what it is, so nobody needs to say.
At least Tony is asking questions.
Oh, I'll certainly give you that. They happen to be remarkably fatuous questions, hence the well-deserved mockery.
Say something ridiculous on a widely read weblog that allows comments, and you will very likely be subject to ridicule from a number of commenters. This shouldn't be so difficult for anybody to understand.
No, what Tony is doing is carrying out his own religious agenda on a blog about Los Angeles. This sh*t is boring and has no place here. If Pierce wants to discuss religion, his beliefs, etc he should do it on his personal blog and leave it off this site. Any discussion here of whether he's right about Kwaanza or KNBC completely misses the larger point.
Religion is a completely fabricated, imaginary concept created by humans who could not explain the world around them. What's a lightning bolt? Uh....God! When he's mad!
After greed, it is the number two cause of war in the world. You can thank religion for the Holocaust, WTC bombing, and the Crusades, just to name a few things....
And Jesus was just a guy. (Who was born in April, not December.)
So, really, if KNBC doesn't want to describe the origin of Christmas (as if anyone doesn't KNOW by now!) that's fine by me. Let's dump religion permanently. It's bullshit.
Having said that, I love the holiday, and actually collect hundreds of Xmas and Hannukah records and CDs, put up a tree, all the rest. I just don't give a rat's ass about "Jesus."
Merry Christmas.
Christians took the christ outta christmas, and the entire religion for that matter. Then they blame others and cry about persecution.
After a year that seemed gleefully light on that tired ass "war on christmas" culture warrior bullshit, I am disappointed to see LAist toeing the religious right's line.
The news sucks. Get over it, oh people of the dominant religion that controls every sphere of our government. Quit whining about persecution and show us you really do believe in christ by helping others or talking about what the man really said. Try drowning out falwell and dobson before you look outside your own house for answers to your problems.
Tony, I really don't know if you're being serious or self-mocking about all this.... When your words coincide so perfectly with those of Stephen Colbert, it's hard to tell.
But, just in case, I'll point out that the word Christmas means "the Mass of Christ," contains the name "Christ," and refers to a religious history that everyone in the viewing range of KNBC knows perfectly. In fact, I doubt there's any other word that we all know the meaning of, history of, ramifications of and traditions surrounding quite so well. And if we did somehow forget, the words of most Christmas carols, TV specials such as "The Little Drummer Boy" and, yes, "A Charlie Brown Christmas," movies such as "The Nativity Story," and the Salvation Army bucket outside every store would be there to remind us. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's not exactly news.
TedSez,
it's not the news' job to let Charles Shultz tell the story of the day. clearly the story of the day was Christmas otherwise they wouldnt have mentioned it once a minute.
to not mention Jesus's name on Christmas is a fuck up, clear and simple. whether it was intentional or accidental, it's still a fuck up.
As for the "everyone knows" argument. Today it rained. Everyone knows it rained. The news will have Team Coverage up the ass tonight about the rain we got / will get. Yet according to your argument they shouldn't mention the word "rain" once because everyone knows that in the Winter in LA it rains.
But they will cover the rain because it is news, if only because everyone talks about it and our lives are slightly effected every time it rains here. Likewise everyone talks about Christmas, our lives are effected on Christmas, and a serious news organization has no business omitting the name of the man who was born on Christmas, who millions of Los Angelenos worship on that day.
On a side note, if you ever seriously doubt whether any of us is kidding on any of our stories - pulling a Colbert - look at the bottom of the post for the category. Rarely we will put that Satire tag down there, but if we're kidding that's the category name you will see.
This one has the News category. Any time a major news organization mentions Christmas 30 times and never mentions Jesus, hate to say it, but that's news.
Clearly you should move to Mississippi.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=25998
Thursday, January 10, 2002
Did you have a happy Kwanzaa?
By Joseph Farah
gosh, i'm not sure what is sadder here: tony's inabilty to think or his inability to spell (perhaps the two are connected; lack of education, perhaps?). comparing the news coverage of christmas with news coverage of the weather is just too damn creative for words. also creative: his spelling.