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March 06, 2003
New Star Wars as celebrities face backlash
Hollywood starts protest campaign
MURRAY WHYTE
ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER
Toronto Star
Mar. 5, 2003. 08:21 AM
He's just doing what the president of the United States should: Speaking openly, passionately and very publicly on his vision for the nation. And the message, conveyed both at boisterous public rallies and through Internet campaigns, is clear: No war on Iraq.
Wait, now. Not that president. George W. Bush is pretty keen on the whole war idea, as we well know.
The other president, Josiah "Jeb" Bartlett, of the extraordinarily popular television drama The West Wing — also known, though perhaps not as well, as actor Martin Sheen.
Sheen, a lifelong activist, is just one of hundreds of the famous and not-so-famous who are using their star status as a stump from which to expound their own views on the pending war.
Conservatives, in return, have mounted their own campaign to vilify the celebrity anti-war effort as traitorous, anti-American or, at best, naïve.
In between them sits a public whose sentiments waver between two sides of the issue — the right of the vastly famous to free speech, versus their dubious qualifications for the role of public opinion leader.
For a culture that descended long ago into celebrity obsession, the anti-war movement growing within the Hollywood elite is simply the crystallization of a fact.
"It's like Hollywood and Washington have become one," said John Orman, a professor of politics at Fairfield University in Connecticut.
Orman, with Brown University professor Darrell West, wrote the just-released book Celebrity Politics, which describes how the cult of celebrity has hijacked political discourse.
"The press pays so much attention to them, they end up sucking all the oxygen out of the political debate," he says of celebrity activists.
"They're systematically taking advantage of their position in society to monopolize public space."
Indeed, multi-million-dollar earners like George Clooney, Dustin Hoffman, Edward Norton, Matt Damon and Susan Sarandon have all made use of the celebrity pulpit.
Million-selling musical artists such as Barbra Streisand, Sheryl Crow and Michael Stipe, Mike Mills and Peter Buck of REM have done the same — Crow most famously with the sequin-studded designer T-shirt she wore at the American Music Awards last month that read "War is not the answer."
Sean Penn made a peace pilgrimage to Baghdad last year.
They have not done so, however, without searing criticism from some quarters.
Aside from the predictable chidings of figures like Rush Limbaugh (he attacked Crow's "hypocrisy" for entertaining troops in Bosnia in 1990), it appears that star power may not be making much of a dent in Bush's approval ratings.
Fox News Channel released a poll last week that said two-thirds of respondents wanted celebrities to stay out of political issues.
A poll released by USA Today, CNN and Gallup found that 87 per cent of respondents said a celebrity lobby would not change their view on Iraq.
Conservative accusations of anti-Americanism may hit stars where it hurts most — in the ratings, at the box office or at the record store.
"Boycott movie stars who are anti-war," was a highly popular message thread on an AOL chat board recently.
This week, Sheen speculated that his anti-war stance had created anxiety among executives at NBC, which airs The West Wing. The fear is that Sheen's criticism of the real president might sour some viewers.
Bill O'Reilly, of Fox News, made the vilification of George Clooney a personal mission on his show after Clooney compared Bush to cable Mafia character Tony Soprano.
Posted by Jo at March 6, 2003 03:07 PM