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I won’t push the disingenuous notion that we all need to accept and empathize with synthetic victim-hoods and bigoted, outrageous rhetoric. However, an understanding must be achieved purely to combat an increasingly reactionary culture.
We realized that by pooling our programming resources, the new 24-hour channel had twice as much programming as we’d had before the merger. We brought Mystery Science Theater 3000 and HA! brought all the old episodes of Saturday Night Live, episodes they’d gotten from NBC a few months earlier. We started developing our own shows, including Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect. We did live special coverage of political events, including the Democratic and Republican conventions, hosted by comedians.
In the wake of Citizens United v. the Federal Election Committee, a landmark Supreme Court decision that prohibits the government from restricting political expenditures by corporations, the notion of “democratic elections” in America now sounds more like an oxymoron than an impetus for political participation. In 2008, a conservative nonprofit group, Citizens defied the FEC by trying to air a scathing film about Hillary Clinton, on DirecTV. Broadcasting “Hillary: The Movie,” a feature-length attack ad against the popular primary candidate, explicitly violated the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (McCain-Feingold). In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United, a now infamous 5-4 decision that has corrupted political democracy in the name of “free speech.”
