Idiotic Censorship Watch

The January 10, 2005 New York Daily News reports the following:

Attention, blue-state parents. Are you worried about what your children are seeing on TV? Have you caught them ogling Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity as they engage in explicit acts of love with Bush administration policies?
Now you can protect your little liberals from hard-core right-wing positions the same way you censor cable porn. For just $8.95, The FOXBlocker eliminates the risk of exposure to Fox News Channel.

Sam Kimery and Joshua Montgomery, who are marketing the device, say it employs the technology already used to filter adult content.

Watching many liberals go into spasms of apoplexy over Fox News is one of my favorite guilty pleasures, along with cheesy action movies and reruns of Cops. Most normal people, of course, already own a device for avoiding channels they don't like. It's called a remote, you might have heard of it. Still, I suppose the risk of being exposed to conservative viewpoints justifies extraordinary measures.

And every time someone orders one of the gizmos from Foxblocker.com, Fox advertisers receive E-mail telling them that another consumer has just said no to Rupert Murdoch's brand of "fair and balanced news."

"We hope that companies will see people actually paying to block channels that won't offer alternative views, and then rethink how they spend their advertising dollars," Montgomery tells Variety V Life magazine.

Ah yes, supporting "alternative views" through censorship. The logic typical of all too many on the left. Embrace diversity, or shut the hell up. Question authority, take my word for it. Of course, the notion that Fox News itself actually represents, gasp, an "alternative view" seems to have escaped Mr. Montgomery.

This is America, no one is going to go to your house and make you watch Fox News at gunpoint. If you don't like it, don't watch it. If you want news from a liberal perspective, you still have ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, and MSNBC. Yet one channel dares to offer news coverage from a right-of-center perspective, and many supposedly refined, sophisticated Blue Staters practically have a meltdown. As we also see in academia, for much of the left the notion of diversity simply doesn't extend to conservative viewpoints.

(Link courtesy of Tim Blair, who has some hilarious comments of his own)