Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Catch O'Reilly/Hardee's clip while you can


Don't know how much longer this clip of Bill O'Reilly interviewing the CEO of Hardee's and Carl's Jr. about that "Flat Buns" ad (above) will be at this link, so better take a look at it now because I couldn't find it elsewhere. It's rather, um, revealing from both sides of the hotseat. In O'Reilly's case it's for taking a commercial about a teacher showing off her accoutrements and immediately skipping to scandals involving teachers molesting children. While the commercial certainly doesn't help on that score, what about starting with the fact that it's in bad taste and that we don't need to encourage 16-year-olds to think of their teachers as sex objects? Those were the first things I thought of, anyway. On the side of Andy Puzder, the CEO of parent company CKE Restaurants, the clip is telling for his insistence that the whole thing was meant as a parody, and that, while the teacher may be gyrating on her desk, "There's no physical contact" between the teacher and students. Puh-leese. Of course, Hardee's/Carl's Jr. has re-edited the spot so as to omit the teacher. However, in the have-it-your-way ethos that typifies media-to-order these days, the company doesn't seem to have petitioned YouTube to take the old spot off its servers.

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