Day: March 10, 2006

Nashville Didn’t Kick the Chicks — Can You Say “Texas?”

Trish

Fellow PR editor Jon posted today on the three-year anniversary of the defamation of the Dixie Chicks. Jon wonders, “if the Bush worshippers in the Nashville music establishment treat the unofficial king and queen of country the same way they treated the Dixie Chicks.”

Jon asks an excellent question, but there’s one problem: you go have to a lot further south than Nashville to find the guys who dropkicked the Chicks.

For one thing, the Dixie Chicks are all women, not one of America’s favorite straight couples.

Leading the charge was Atlanta-based Cumulus Media — the second largest owner of radio stations in the country — which banned the Chicks, then held the first of many rallies across the country in Shreveport, La. (just across the Texas state line) in which bulldozers smashed Chicks CDs, posters, etc.

Jumping on the bandwagon and riding it from sea to sea was Clear Channel, mega mega owner of the airwaves, which held onto the issue — and the Dixie Chicks — with a death grip.

Clear Channel is also not based in Nashville, but in sunny San Antonio, which I should mention, is in Texas. SourceWatch.org has the 4-1-1 on Clear Channel.

“The vice chairman of Clear Channel is Tom Hicks… When Mr. Bush was governor of Texas, Mr. Hicks was chairman of the University of Texas Investment Management Company, called Utimco, and Clear Channel’s chairman, Lowry Mays, was on its board. Under Mr. Hicks, Utimco placed much of the university’s endowment under the management of companies with strong Republican Party or Bush family ties. In 1998 Mr. Hicks purchased the Texas Rangers in a deal that made Mr. Bush a multimillionaire.”

“In addition, Hicks steered a controversial scheme to use the University of Texas’ $13 billion endowment for private investment. Among the beneficiaries were the Carlyle Group, the arms investment firm tied to both George Bush Snr and the bin Laden family, and George W Bush’s controversial Harken Oil drilling project in Bahrain.”

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Country Stars Tim McGraw and Faith Hill Criticize Bush – But Will They Be Treated Like the Dixie Chicks?

Jon Ponder

Three years ago today, March 10, 2003, during the run-up to the war in Iraq, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks caused a political firestorm when she stated from the stage in London that, as native Texans, she and her bandmates were “ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.” The repercussions of her statement back in the States led to a boycott of Dixie Chicks on country radio and radio station stunts like running over a pile of Dixie Chicks CDs with a bulldozer.

In fact, it was the Dixie Chicks incident that emboldened the rightwing to set up its new paradigm of pure political thought:

Criticizing Bush = Hating America

Now a pair of huge stars in the country music firmament, Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, have gone on record criticizing President Bush — not on the war, but on his disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina:

Faith Hill and Tim McGraw — two stars who usually stay out of politics — blasted the Hurricane Katrina cleanup effort, with Hill calling the slow progress in Louisiana and Mississippi “embarrassing” and “humiliating.”

The country music artists — who are natives of the storm-ravaged states — were at times close to tears, and clearly angry when the subject of Katrina came up during a news conference today. They had met with reporters in Nashville to promote their upcoming Soul2Soul II Tour, but when asked about the hurricane cleanup, the stars pulled no punches.

“To me, there’s a lot of politics being played and a lot of people trying to put people in bad positions in order to further their agendas,” McGraw, a 38-year-old native of Delhi, La., said after ABC News Radio’s Dan Gordon asked about Katrina.

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