Jill Porter | By all that is hole-y: Fox 29 promo shame
IF YOU WERE a lucky viewer of Fox 29's local morning show, "Good Day Philadelphia," yesterday, you could have won the latest in hip fashion wear:
IF YOU WERE a lucky viewer of Fox 29's local morning show, "Good Day Philadelphia," yesterday, you could have won the latest in hip fashion wear:
A bullet-riddled jacket.
Well, OK, not the real thing - that would be too icky with blood and bone fragments, anyway - but a pretend bullet-riddled jacket and a battered hat that looks as if it had been stomped in a street brawl.
The station offered the clothing and other paraphernalia to promote the new Clive Owen movie, "Shoot 'Em Up," which opens Friday.
"Good Day" anchor Clayton Morris and weather anchor Sue Serio bantered about the jacket - although from the audio I've heard, Serio did seem slightly chagrined - during the Let's Make Light of Murder segment.
OK, kidding.
It was during the Let's Romanticize Violence segment.
OK, giggle. Just kidding again.
It was during a weather/traffic/entertainment segment, in which Morris invited viewers to e-mail the answer to a trivia question to be eligible to win the "great items."
Serio questioned how "great" the items were and then said, "It's just a movie, folks."
The promotion - Morris was actually wearing the jacket - sure got the attention of a viewer named Jeff.
"My initial reaction was shock - how could they raffle off a jacket with fake bullet holes . . . in Philly!" he wrote in an e-mail.
"I e-mailed Fox to let them know how disappointed I was that they obviously prefer dollars to sense," he said.
Jeff, Jeff, Jeff.
You've got to lighten up.
It's not as if Fox 29 did the promotion in the news section, while reporting on the latest carnage that besieged our town over the weekend.
That would be eight people killed from Friday to Monday, and another body found in a duffel bag, which presumably would bring the number to nine when the investigation is complete.
Saturday was actually a banner day: Six people were slain in a 24 hours, which sounds as if it should be some kind of record outside an actual military battlefield.
But why should that take the fun out of winning a bullet-riddled jacket?
Jennifer Best, WTXF-Fox 29's community-affairs director, said the station does movie promotions all the time.
But I still had to ask whether the station thought it appropriate to hawk a bullet-torn jacket when the city is up to its neck in bullet-riddled bodies?
Best said she'd get back to me with an official statement.
And here it is, courtesy of Mike Renda, vice president and general manager:
"It was a movie promotion."
Well, that settles it, doesn't it?
No need to think about context, or community responsibility, or corporate message, when it's just a movie promotion after all.
As for Al Toczydlowski, the chief of the D.A.'s gun violence task force - what can you expect from someone who gets to witness violence of the not-a-movie-promotion variety?
"I don't think that's the right message," he said of the Fox promotion. "Where are we going with that?"
Why, to the movies, of course.
And some lucky wearer will show up wearing a bullet-riddled jacket.
Some folks who are similarly clad may wind up missing the movie, though, on their way to the ER or the morgue.
Too bad. I hear Clive Owen's performance in "Shoot 'Em Up" is to die for. *
E-mail porterj@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5850. For recent columns: