Here are today’s dispatches from the crossroads of faith, media and culture.

1. Television makes strange bedfellows. From The Wrap: Gloria Steinem is no fan of NBC’s upcoming “The Playboy Club.” In the 1960s, the feminist icon rose to public attention after posing as a Bunny in the New York Playboy Club for an investigative piece that ran in Show magazine. It did not leave her with a warm feeling about the joint. The feminist icon said that she hopes viewers doom the show with their dial because it is demeaning to women. “I expect that ‘The Playboy Club’ will be a net minus and I hope people boycott it. It’s just not telling the truth about the era,” Steinem says.  Steinem may have an unlikely ally in the Parents Television Council. The parents’ watchdog group and opponent of all things salacious has been busy pressuring affiliates to refuse to broadcast the nightclub drama.
Comment: Meanwhile, as predicted here, NBC is attempting to spin the skin mag marketing vehicle as some kind of ode to women’s empowerment.  As Al Gore would say, Bullsh—!

2. PG-13 can be Pretty Gruesome for kids. From The Wrap: Make no mistake, the PG-13 rated movies are getting edgier and rougher — including, notably, the final “Harry Potter” installments, and the even more brutal “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” that debuted last weekend.
Comment: Meanwhile, as is noted in the article, a movie like The King’s Speech gets an R.

BTW, for something really obscene, checkout this next story.

3. TV’s Fat Cats. From TV Guide: The general rule across the TV business is to keep lead performers on new network prime-time series to $125,000 an episode. (Cable networks are going as high as $150,000.)…Hit series vets Tim Allen and Kiefer Sutherland will get $225,000 an episode to go back to the weekly grind in new shows…Ted Danson will earn $225,000 an episode to join CSI — a savings from Laurence Fishburne’s $350,000. Warner Bros.’ Ashton Kutcher is now the highest-paid sitcom actor at $700,000 per episode — far less than Sheen’s take of $1.2 million…And Current TV is trying to enter the cable big leagues with Keith Olbermann, giving him $10 million a year and an equity stake in the network. Time Warner, meanwhile, tied up Anderson Cooper with a new talk show and a new deal at CNN that pays him around $11 million a year.
Comment: I guess they call them stars because of their sky-high salaries.  Anyway, people of the people, I’m sure they refuse all federal tax deductions and divide their paychecks equally with they (much) lower paid co-workers.

Encourage one another and build each other up – 1 Thessalonians 5:11