Variety is a Hollywood trade publication, but it can be hard to figure out where the entertainment industry ends and the industry’s journalistic apple-polishers begin. Exhibit A is a commentary by Brian Lowry trying to compare the news media’s current hate objects – the Tea Party tax protesters – with the entertainment media’s hate objects, the activists opposing Hollywood-distributed vulgarity.

Lowry dismisses both movements as hopelessly lost in the past, insisting the Tea Parties “sound strangely familiar, mirroring increasingly futile attempts to arrest changes and recapture simpler times in television – an ongoing Tea Party on the tube. In spirit and tone, these criticisms in the political arena sound very much like those leveled against network television by the Parents Television Council and other lobbying groups pushing back against a perceived erosion of broadcast standards.” Full Piece