{"id":186448,"date":"2014-01-18T21:49:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-19T02:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/01\/18\/there-is-still-some-hope-for-us-as-a-society\/"},"modified":"2014-01-18T21:49:00","modified_gmt":"2014-01-19T02:49:00","slug":"there-is-still-some-hope-for-us-as-a-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/01\/18\/there-is-still-some-hope-for-us-as-a-society\/","title":{"rendered":"There is Still Some Hope for Us as a Society"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I expected that the opposite would happen, but it appears that the controversy over its star&#8217;s bigotry has <a href=\"http:\/\/talkingpointsmemo.com\/livewire\/duck-dynasty-phil-robertson-season-five-ratings-down\">driven away viewers form Duck Dynasty<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">It turns out that a national controversy sparked by racist and homophobic remarks doesn&#8217;t necessarily result in a ratings boost for a television show.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Many speculated that &#8220;Duck Dynasty,&#8221; A&amp;E&#8217;s hit reality series about a family of swamp millionaires who made their fortune off duck calls, would draw even more viewers after one of the show&#8217;s stars, Phil Robertson, made headlines last month for railing against &#8220;homosexual offenders,&#8221; &#8220;Shintos&#8221; and &#8220;Islamists&#8221; in a wild interview with GQ.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">But rather than a ratings spike, viewership for the show&#8217;s season five premiere actually dipped considerably. Wednesday&#8217;s premiere drew 8.5 million viewers, down 28 percent from the season four premiere last August. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I expected that the opposite would happen, but it appears that the controversy over its star&#8217;s bigotry has driven away viewers form Duck Dynasty: It turns out that a national controversy sparked by racist and homophobic remarks doesn&#8217;t necessarily result in a ratings boost for a television show.Many speculated that &#8220;Duck Dynasty,&#8221; A&amp;E&#8217;s hit reality &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[967,1092,1065],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bigotry","category-culture","category-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186448"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186448\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}