Cartoon Network reminds its viewers that unless their politics are identical to founder Ted Turner's, the network doesn't want them in the audience:

Fans fearing that “The Boondocks,” the wildly scathing, racially charged comic strip, will lose its bite when it appears on television next week need not worry. Within the first 10 seconds of the new show of the same name, viewers will be offered the following Molotov cocktail of social criticism: “Jesus is black, Ronald Reagan is the devil and the government is lying about 9/11.”

Since its national debut six years ago, the strip, about two black children living in white suburbia, has slaughtered its share of sacred cows, eviscerating everyone from Condoleezza Rice and Strom Thurmond to 50 Cent and Ralph Nader. President Bush has been a frequent target. As a result, the strip has been suspended, banished to editorial pages and dropped from some newspapers (it currently appears in more than 300).

Trying to translate that incendiary spirit into great television will be a challenge, an expensive challenge at that. Cartoon Network pays Sony Pictures Television, producer of the series, an estimated license fee of $400,000 per episode. Add to that the millions the network has spent on marketing, including many billboards in New York and Los Angeles trumpeting the show’s premiere on Nov. 6 in the late-night “Adult Swim” block, and “The Boondocks” becomes the most expensive show the network has made.

(Hat tip: Charles Johnson, who is also responsible for the original bolding in the above text.)

Last January, Jim Geraghty noted the disparity in media coverage, focusing primarily on the news:

If you're a conservative, chances are you prefer Fox News. You often sense that the "mainstream" networks don't give a fair shake to your leaders, your party, your views, or your beliefs.

If you're a liberal, maybe you prefer your media to be a little more pugnacious — Air America, or the columns of Paul Krugman or Molly Ivins. But by and large, you find the mainstream media's tone and coverage choices to be preferable to Fox.

But if you're a liberal, or at least a non-conservative, your attention is the target of CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, and all the major-network news operations — basically, every one except Fox News. Fox will welcome you and tout their fair and balanced approach and their room for such liberal commentators as Alan Colmes, Juan Williams, and Mara Liasson, but by and large they're well-established as the network of choice for conservatives.

In the print world, the major newsweekly magazines, and almost every major city newspaper is clamoring for your attention if you're a non-conservative. In fact, most of the coverage is written from, and for, your viewpoint. You can read the New York Times nationally, or the Los Angeles Times, or Reuters wire copy. Both Chicago and Philadelphia have two major papers, neither of which is conservative. At the magazine rack, you have The New Republic, The Nation, The American Prospect, The Progressive, Mother Jones, Washington Monthly, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harpers, the post-Michael Kelly Atlantic Monthly, and Slate and Salon on the web. (This list isn't exhaustive, I'm just trying to give a sense of the breadth and depth.)

On the radio dial, you've got Air America, as well as much of NPR's programming.

That's a lot of media competing for the attention of the 49 percent.

Meanwhile, on cable, Fox News pretty much has the 51 percent to itself, unless you want to count Joe Scarborough, Dennis Miller, and about half the Capitol Gang.

It's a similar situation in print: You have a few conservative magazines, NR, The Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, and The American Conservative, as well as the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and some alternative newspapers like the Washington Times, the New York Post, New York Sun, Boston Herald, etc. The radio dial gives you a decent slew of options.

But by and large, the right-of-center "alternative" media outlets are courting the 51 percent, while the many more mainstream media outlets are courting the 49 percent.

Boondocks will be a write-off for Cartoon Network. It won't get any ratings in the heartland where most of TV's viewers are, but it certainly will get good press and buzz in New York and Los Angeles. much like Fahrenheit 9/11, of which Daniel Henninger wrote last year:

This is moviemaking for bicoastal cultural elites. They get to look down at the opposition, at "Bush," but they also get to feel superior to their own foot soldiers in the proletarian heartland.

The F-9/11 crowd now has a cartoon series to join its cartoon "documentary".

The New York Times article above quotes the show--and presumably Aaron McGruder, the creator of the comic strip it's based on, as saying, "Jesus is black, Ronald Reagan is the devil and the government is lying about 9/11". The New Yorker reported last year that McGruder claims he called Condoleezza Rice a mass murderer to her face at the 2002 NAACP Image Awards.

It's interesting to note, beginning probably with Oliver Stone, how many millions Hollywood is willing to pour into the coffers of ideologically like-minded guys who make Criswell sound like Solzhenitsyn, and who would never have gotten past a studio's front gates during the 1930s and '40s. Based on the number of conspirators in JFK, when Mick Jagger sang, "I shouted out who killed the Kennedys, but after all, it was you and me", Stone took him literally. Ted Turner recently told Wolf Blitzer that the only thing wrong with North Korea was that people "were thin, and they were riding bicycles instead of driving in cars". The afore mentioned Michael Moore believes that Iraq was nothing but pizza and fairytales until President Bush was elected, despite mass graves, a million casualties in its war with Iran, some killed via chemical weapons, its invasion of Kuwait, and President Clinton's attacks against it. Morgan Spurlock is mock-surprised that eating 5,000 calories a day at McDonalds made him fat. And so on. And don't get me started on all of the actors involved with this sentence censored by representatives of L. Ron Hubbard.

But really, for television--like the movies--which is more important? Actually making money, or keeping your friends in the cocoon-like echo chamber happy?