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Erasing the Banned
Lori Loughlin and Jack Wagner in “When Calls the Heart.” (Hallmark Channel/Photo Illustration EJHill)
Hallmark Channel has announced that its signature series, When Calls the Heart, returns on May 5th, without Lori Loughlin and with one fewer episode than ordered. Back on March 14th when the news of the college admissions scandal first broke, Crown Media, the studio arm of the Kansas City-based greeting card company, fired Loughlin and announced that all future projects with her had been canceled. The producers of the beloved frontier soaper assured viewers that the series would return and that they would explore all options during a “creative hiatus.”
Through editing and reshoots, Loughlin has now been “erased” from the remaining episodes. Like the old Soviet Union we are now airbrushing those who have fallen from grace from society, allowing them to remain on the fringes where their only function is to serve as a warning to others. We are no longer satisfied with the judgments of the courts since due process is too slow and can ultimately be so unsatisfying. From now on we will mete out our own punishments – quickly and decisively – and the rest be damned.
The creators of The Simpsons recently pulled the episode featuring Michael Jackson and all of Bill Cosby’s television offerings have been removed from syndication, as have reruns of Roseanne and 7th Heaven. When the digital sub-network Bounce returned Cosby’s show to their rotation they were inundated with criticism. “Good to know where your corporation stands on rapists I guess,” wrote one viewer. So it’s no longer enough to ignore the offerings of those you deem unacceptable, you must deny their creative talents to others. And you must deny those residual checks to innocent colleagues who had the unfortunate luck to be associated with them.
Someday soon the FBI will probably be conducting pre-dawn no-knock raids on those known to have old copies of the Huxtables on DVD. Little old ladies will be frogmarched in handcuffs for trading thumb drives with episodes of Garage Sale Mysteries and the Twitter accounts of the “Hearties” will be archived for future shaming sessions. And despite what those spearheading these erasures may believe, we are not creating a better society. All we’re doing is softening ourselves up for censorship, historical revisionism and embracing the sweet siren song of totalitarianism.
Published in General
Both may be.
as indicated before, one is technically illegal while the other isn’t, at least so far. But they both circumvent actual academics. Unless you can explain to me how, for example, being an ACTUAL football player – or crew, or whatever – is more academically relevant to going to college than being a FAKE football player (or whatever) is.
What I don’t understand is why this college admissions scam is a crime against the state warranting formal criminal prosecution, trial, and prison time rather than just a civil lawsuit by the schools against the parents. Expulsion of the kids, I can see, and perhaps a lawsuit against the parents. I don’t see how it is a crime against the state.
When the bankruptcy reform bill went through in 2005 and student loans joined federal personal taxes on the extremely short list of debts that would not be discharged by the bankruptcy, it really bothered me that the schools and the government were so tightly intertwined. In a sense, the bankruptcy law gave some kind of superior status to colleges and universities above all other kinds of debt. It is a weird relationship. We talk about the left’s media-politicians’ bizarre relationship, but we miss the bizarre relationship between higher education and the media-politicians-government bloc.
I can’t help seeing this confusion–the reigning monarchy consisting of the media, government, politicians, and higher education–playing out here in our seeing this cheating scandal as being a crime against the state.
It is just plain weird to me. This is a matter for the civil courts unless we have completely lost our ability to see that what admissions committees do and what colleges do and the types of tests the College Board nonprofit organization writes and administers is entirely up to them and governed only by their own whims.
I must be missing something here.
That’s a good point. Where I see it falling down, though, is when the schools themselves are in cahoots with the “cheaters,” which is very common.
You raise some good points, @marcin. A lot of the violations come out of individual states contending with organized crime and some of those elements using out-of-state players that frustrated the investigation and prosecution of those crimes. So the feds have jurisdiction over any interstate fraud involving the use of common carriers that are federally regulated and the banking system. This is very broad. Throw in the tax fraud and state funded institutions that were targeted in the fraud and the link is completed.
Also, the federal government seems to have insinuated itself into just about all, if not ALL, student loans. So they can claim to be “victimized” by any “misuse” of student loan funds.
The tax fraud makes sense to me. And I see what you and kedavis are saying about the case the prosecutors are making. That’s interesting.
I do still think this a dangerous precedent. I don’t like to see the government involved in this way in college admissions.
As Rob Long might say,”So in other words, Tuesday.” :-)
I wanted to post a video clip of “Mortuary Hour” from Monty Python, but nobody seems to have it now.
Good comment. I too have not understood why it’s not up to the universities to initiate the actions.
And that’s a good point about the government-academic complex. Didn’t President Eisenhower warn us of something like that?
But her BMX bike prom scene in Rad can never be erased.
FIFY. Very clever intercutting between Lori and the stunt double (Martin Aparijo/Pat Romano).
Agree.
Maybe it’s just me, but I prefer a bikini over a BMX.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kXFAZIn3d4
Has anyone actually read the actual indictment? Is there a link to it?
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5805817-Second-Superseding-Indictment-0.html#document/p1
I’m in agreement. And even if it is a crime against the state, the states, not the feds should be doing the prosecuting.
If anything happened across state lines – which seems likely – then the feds like to take over.
I doubt there would be a lawsuit brought by the Universities against the parents given the Universities, through their athletic department representatives, were essentially taking the bribes.
The injured party to bring a lawsuit against the Universities would probably be students who were denied admissions to the University even having adequate credentials to gain admission, while the cheaters took their place.
But I agree with MarciN, and I’ve commented, that a Federal criminal prosecution of the parents seems like overkill.
William Rick Singer who facilitated bribery, but more on the nose, set up a fraudulent 501(c)(3) and evaded taxes, should be prosecuted for tax evasion for sure. The University officials taking bribes, could be prosecuted depending the frequency of bribe taking and on how much money they were making in the scheme.
But the parents …. I still don’t believe slipping a “guy” some dough to get your kid in the door reaches the level of criminality … ethically sh##ty yes …. but what do I know.
I just read the indictment. The 501 c 3 was fully authorized by the IRS at the time of the transactions, so there is no reason for the parents to think they were giving to a fraudulent organization. What surprised me were the private phone calls quoted. Where did these come from? It seems to me that after Singer’s organization was being audited he changed his tune, recorded the phone calls as evidence for the government as part of a deal to lessen charges against himself. If you read the phone calls, he’s setting the parents up to take a fall.
I agree the parents would not have committed tax fraud by giving money to an IRS approved 501(c)(3), but William Rick Singer is screwed because his “charity” appears to be a fraud used as his personal piggy bank through which he paid himself tax free.
To the extent the Feds went after the (users) parents through the (dealer) bribe facilitator Singer, the Feds have succeeded in getting Pablo Escobar to help lock up the street level heroin addicts.
@anamcara
Good to know about it. Haven’t got a lot of time for podcasts, but I do make time for those I feel would interest me.
Sadly, bribing people and ignoring the God given commandment about not lying or stealing seems to be okay with many people. Then the rest of us wonder why we live inside a sea of such total corruption.
The instructions from God (as contained in Exodus) only relate to bribing judges.
The individuals inflated their resume, that is hardly bearing false witness against one’s neighbor.
I have yet to see the actual theft.
So no, I didn’t say it was OK. What I suggested was, when someone is told that to get their kid in the college of their choice you must pay a kickback, or bribe, or other such, it seems the person corrupted is more the criminal than that person paying.
Re # 114
And more corrupting than the person paying.
The proper punishment would have the “death penalty” and revocation of all championships won by players involved in the wrongful activity . . .
I am not a sports person, except in the most casual sense. I also (in general) do not agree with collective punishment. So I don’t understand the impact that a “death penalty” (as enumerated above) would have in a sports team. I means, the fans will still recall the wins, even if the record book doesn’t.
What I think should happen is that those guilty of real, actual, no kidding fraud (those bilking the purported “students” of their athletic ability, while offering recurring classes in African-American Studies) should be sent to jail and forced to pay restitution to the victims.
The NCAA’s “death penalty” is more than revocation of championships. It is the complete suspension of a sport at an affiliated school and severe restrictions on media coverage and scholarships afterwards. It has only been invoked 5 times, the last two involving non-Division I programs. Several schools have imposed it upon themselves. The last D-I “death penalty” imposed was on Southern Methodist football in 1987.
This, of course, predates the era of the Conference-owned media networks. There’s no real possibility it will ever be considered again. Schools are not rivals, they’re business partners.
We’re the only country that marries varsity sports to our high schools and colleges. It started with football in the Ivy League.
The low grade corruption (and we are talking low grade in this present mostly non-athletic scandal as well) also extends to the military academies in the United States. Though none of them have formal athletic scholarships the same way their civilian counterparts do, they still recruit athletes for their various athletic programs (including hockey, the only NCAA sport I follow).
Entry to the military academies are laid out in statute. There’s no special dispensation for prospective varsity athletes.
I know several athletes that were recruited to academies. Five years post graduation none of them still serving. I know a few that never served a day after graduation