Monday, September 17, 2007

Fox Censors Sally Field

At the Emmy's last night, Sally Field won best actress in a drama series for her work as matriarch Nora Walker on "Brothers & Sisters." She remarked in her acceptance speech:

Surely this [award] belongs to all the mothers of the world. May they be seen, may their work be valued and raised. Especially to the mothers who stand with an open heart and wait. Wait for their children to come home from danger, from harm’s way, and from war. I am proud to be one of those women.
At that point, she began her next sentence, "If mothers ruled the world, there would be no...”. But Fox cut off her sound and pointed the camera away from her, censoring the rest of her sentence, which ended, "...god-damned wars in the first place."

Backstage, Sally Field told reporters: ''I honestly believe that if mothers ruled the world, we wouldn't be sending our children off to be slaughtered.... I probably shouldn't have said the 'God' in front of the 'damn.' I would've liked to have said more bleeped-out words, but that's life.''

Some people on the net are saying Fox censored Field to remove the "god-damned". But Fox is more than passively pro-war -- To say the network leads in beating the drums for the Iraq war is an understatement. It seems reasonable to assume they censored Field at least as much for her anti-war opinion as for her use of "god-damned".

Sadly, Fox has a legal right to censor whatever it wants to censor, so there won't be any lawsuits over this.


References:

Fox Censors Sally Field's Anti-War Speech at Emmy's

Wow! They Censored Sally Field!

Emmy's Backstage: Stars Get Sassy


Related Article:

Kathy Griffin's Emmy Remarks Will Be Censored

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Never quite thought of it like that...if mothers ruled the world...
oh, I wish!!

Paul Sunstone said...

Hi Nita! One of the obscenities about the Iraq war is that the political elites who are most responsible for it almost to a person do not have any family members in the military. It seems to me they are willing to send other people's sons and daughters off to fight and die, but not their own.

Anonymous said...

In fact, this might be serendipity.

Sally's comments will get more attention, be more widely blogged about, and create more negative attention for fox news because of their choice to enact such pointed censorship.

Anonymous said...

Why am I not at all surprised?

As much as I detest censorship, I have to agree with amuirin. Maybe the fact that they did censor her is a double blessing because a) it draws more attention to her point and b) considering it's Sally Field it only looks worse for Fox.

I'm all for Fox shooting themselves in the foot.

Paul Sunstone said...

I hope you two are right, Amuirin and Jamie! You know, if Fox did censor Field for political reasons, as I believe is likely, then that's a first for the Emmy's.