Power to the Posters!
CBS officials acknowledged a sense of awe, if not shock, at the fury of the conservative response through cable news shows, radio talk shows and, most notably, the Internet. The network, they said, received about 80,000 angry e-mail notes, protesting the mini-series.
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NEW YORK TIMES
The Man Who Would Save Reagan From a TV History
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
BETHESDA, Md., Nov. 6 — Growing up in a conservative family outside Philadelphia, he came of age politically when Ronald Reagan was president and never lost his reverence for him.
Now, after years of anonymous admiration, Michael Paranzino is playing a major role in preserving Mr. Reagan's image. A former Congressional aide who is now a political consultant and work-at-home dad, Mr. Paranzino spurred an Internet revolt against CBS that altered its plans to broadcast a mini-series on Mr. Reagan and his wife, Nancy.
Through a Web site name he bought for $8.95, BoycottCBS.com, and a blur of appearances on radio and television talk shows, Mr. Paranzino helped arouse so much opposition to the mini-series that CBS declared on Tuesday that the show was too flawed for mass consumption, and handed it off to a another division of Viacom, the Showtime cable unit, where it would have a much smaller audience.
Mr. Paranzino, 37, is too modest to take all the credit, but he can scarcely believe the mountain he has moved from the cluttered downstairs den of his suburban Washington home, where he and his son, Cameron, 2, click away on side-by-side desktop computers. Each computer is now choked with the hundreds of thousands of e-mail messages that became a critical part of the campaign against CBS, and hundreds more pour in by the hour.
"I'm happy. I'm excited. But there's still a problem that it's on Showtime," Mr. Paranzino said on Thursday as Cameron connected numbered dots on a Sesame Street software program. "I'm grateful that it's not going into 110 million homes as it would have on CBS. But it's still a smear of a great American leader on a network that'll reach 15 million homes, and I'm still getting hundreds of e-mails telling me, `Don't stop, keep the movement alive.' "
The official line from CBS is that the network did not buckle under pressure from Mr. Paranzino or anybody else and that its chairman, Leslie Moonves, simply made a principled decision.
But CBS officials acknowledged a sense of awe, if not shock, at the fury of the conservative response through cable news shows, radio talk shows and, most notably, the Internet. The network, they said, received about 80,000 angry e-mail notes, protesting the mini-series.
"If it was just on its own, I don't think anyone would have paid attention," one person close to the production said, referring to Mr. Paranzino's one-man stand. "I think it was a collection of everything together, and that had a cumulative effect."
Mr. Paranzino said he never imagined getting so immersed in defending Mr. Reagan until he read in the online Drudge Report about an article that appeared in The New York Times on Oct. 21 that included excerpts from the mini-series. He was infuriated, he said, to learn that a line attributed to Mr. Reagan, discussing AIDS — "They that live in sin shall die in sin" — was invented as a dramatic device.
"It set me off," he said. "It set a lot of people off, especially when the author acknowledged that he invented the quote. Then, more excerpts came out. That weekend I was still angry."
Armed with his new Web site, he embarked on a plan to encourage people to boycott the mini-series and any company that would buy commercial time during its broadcast. He did not mean for the boycott to include all of CBS, he noted, "because people like `Everybody Loves Raymond' and football games, and I didn't want people to change their lives over the issue even if they felt strongly about it."
Soon, the campaign ballooned beyond his imagination. The glut of e-mail responses crashed his computer. His phone rang constantly with invitations to appear on talk shows, large and small. For a while, he was a staple on the Fox News Channel.
"A lot of factors coincided," he said, playing down his role. "But they all worked out with the same impact — stories in print, on the Web, on radio, on cable. I don't want to overstate the role of the Web, but I believe it had an impact."
Mr. Paranzino said one of his favorite recollections of President Reagan was his 1987 speech in Berlin, where he implored his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, to tear down the wall. "I still get goose bumps," he said.
But he always fashioned himself more a soldier of the right than a leader, and little in his past suggests otherwise.
With a bachelor's degree from Yale and a law degree from New York University, he set off for Phoenix to practice law and take advantage of constant sunshine for his psoriasis.
Slowly drawn to politics, he quit his law practice in 1994 and for the next five years worked for two Arizona Republican lawmakers, Senator Jon Kyl and Representative Matt Salmon, a conservative from Mesa. Mr. Salmon became best known in Congress for leading the campaign to oust Newt Gingrich as House speaker on the ground that he had abandoned his conservative positions; Mr. Salmon also promoted an effort to have Mr. Reagan's likeness carved into Mount Rushmore.
In 1999, Mr. Paranzino left Arizona to join Elizabeth Dole's presidential exploratory committee. After Mrs. Dole decided not to run, he and his wife, Heather, a scientist at the National Institutes of Health, moved to the Washington suburbs. Once Cameron was born, Mr. Paranzino began consulting so he could stay home while his wife worked in the laboratory.
His wife has been supportive of his efforts to drive the Reagan mini-series into oblivion, he said. But she has been anything but an active partner. For one thing, Mr. Paranzino said, she is too busy with her research. For another, he said, "she's a Democrat."
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