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You probably missed it if you aren’t the parent of a school-aged kid, but there was a successful culture jam Tuesday night.
President Obama managed to get his remarks on the importance of education out to even more kids; he did an end run around the freak-show conservative parents who tried to keep kids from the scary evils of being indoctrinated into the socialist agenda of going to school, being personally responsible and studying hard.
But let me back up for a second. After asking my kids to read the President’s speech Monday and to share their opinions, they told me on arriving home from school that their high school and middle school didn’t show the speech Tuesday during their first day back after summer vacation.
I’m angry, but I shouldn’t be surprised; I live in a suburb where 60% to 75% of frequent voters identify as conservative, a mix of white-flight Republicans and Reagan-God-guns-gays Democrats. I’m sure they were burning up the phone lines this past week giving the school district’s administrator what-for about the impending socialist indoctrination. Many parents have pulled their kids from the public schools and put them in private religious schools or in out-lying districts simply because they don’t want their kids going to school with THOSE kids.
Damnable ignorant bigots.
So my son and I just happened to be talking about the speech about 8:00 p.m. Tuesday night when Nickelodeon network’s Get Schooled program started -— and lo, there’s President Obama and his speech writer Sarah Hurwitz, and they are talking about the value of education in getting a dream job.
Culture jam!!! Eff you conservative freaks, Viacom gave the POTUS a back door to your kids’ minds!
What tickled me most is my son’s reaction to the program. He’d gone upstairs to watch Get Schooled in his room, but ran downstairs at the end of the show, yelling at me, "Did you see Obama gave part of the speech??"
Yup, I did — or at least I saw that Obama gave a short, brief comment directly to viewers which looked like an excerpt from the actual speech he’d given to students earlier during the day. He told his young viewers to find something they were passionate about, to study hard and stay in school.
Which as we all know are the key tenets of socialism… /snark
Let me point out that the program is evidence that Jim Greer is wrong, that Obama didn’t change his speech to accommodate Greer’s whiny little hissy fit. The program demonstrates that the point Obama was trying to make to kids was already in the can with Nick.com, and as the quote in the graphic above shows, Obama has been talking about the issue of improving education and keeping kids in school since he took office.
Be sure to check out GetSchooled.com as it looks like it’s a broader initiative to improve school as well as get drop-outs back in school.
It seems like it’s been a while since I was thankful to a corporation, but Viacom and Nick.com, thanks much for doing the right thing by our kids, and for producing a constructive educational program which is more than entertainment.
[Graphic: composition generated from Viacom's GetSchooled.com.]
9 Comments
The White House has a whole media kit for teachers and parents called My Education, My Future. I linked to it yesterday on one of the threads and pointed out that you cannot change a speech in the last minute when you have a whole PR campaign developed around it.
There was this:
That video contest sounds pretty cool. It is tied into the Get Schooled campaign.
The Get Schooled campaign is also being tied into a national database of free tutoring resources, from my understanding.
And, I am sure today we will start to hear the, “He’s got an Ivy League education,” type of spin, the elitist smear. To distract from the, “He changed his speech,” crap.
You know it’s bad when they send out Newt to try a “save” themselves media-wise.
Yeah, gotta’ be really bad when Newt “Family Values” Gingrich sounds like the voice of reason.
Maybe they should take this whine-fest over the speech situation as a hint that their teabaggers are completely out of control. The teabaggers are only useful if they can be reined in, otherwise they are like wild dogs and will bite at anyone and anything, including other conservatives.
JimWhite (3) — yup. Complete concurrence. Flapped off his mouth before asking any questions, looks like a moron during and after the fact.
Kathryn in MA (4) — me too, blown away last night about the program’s timing and that nobody on the right paid it any attention whatsoever. It’s not like the White House snuck it into Nick’s line up; I realized this morning that I’d heard promotions on Nick for weeks about Get Schooled, but didn’t pay it any attention because it seemed like just another kids’ show, nothing out of the ordinary. Who knew?
Greer is an idiot.
i’m tickled silly! good news.
thanks Rayne! now off the mommy track, I would have missed it.
am I reading too much in to it when I giggle about the stealth nature of the WH not saying anything about it prior to it’s launch ?? still chuckling
Rayne,
Did you pick up the “triumph” story about the student who fought cancer and had multiple brain surgeries and is now going to college?
An interesting triumph to pick on the heels of a health care debate.
cbl2 (6) — oh, it’s the “stealth” part which made me bust out loud laughing in front of my kid last night. Stealthy? HAH!! Nick is the number one cable channel for the K-11 crowd, drew 47% of total kid audience in 2008. Even their website is hot, draws 3.2 million visitors a month.
And adults didn’t notice. Not even me, and I usually pay more attention to my kids’ programming. Only saw there had been advertising for an evening program about dream jobs, but somehow it never clicked with me that one of the dream jobs they mentioned they’d explore was Obama’s speech writer’s job.
Nick’s also far more popular with boys than Disney, so there were solid reasons for Viacom to do this, had better access to a more diverse audience.
Only thing worrying me is the likelihood that ‘wingers will go on offense agaist Nick — on the other hand, if they do, it’s likely to make Nick even more popular.
klynn — hadn’t picked that up, am going to try to locate a re-airing or video of this as I’d been talking with my son or helping my daughter during much of last night’s program.
Here’s a link.(President’s speech only)