Mine workers from West Virginia and Kentucky took their protest of the planned reality show "The Real Beverly Hillbillies" to CBS' parent company on Wednesday.
"We're tired of the negative image of the Appalachian people," Tom Manuel, an underground electrician from Fairmont, W. Va., said outside Viacom's Manhattan headquarters, where the media giant was holding a shareholders meeting.
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Roberts said his union would continue to protest around the country until CBS withdraws plans for the program. He also vowed to stage civil disobedience actions, boycott the show's advertisers and pressure local CBS affiliates not to carry the program.
People across the Appalachian region have been voicing strong opposition to the show.
Other major labor unions and 43 members of the House of Representatives from Florida to Texas also have asked CBS to cancel plans for the program.
"Every state of the union has people that are illiterate and culturally backward," said Manuel, who came to New York with a dozen other union members. "But for some reason everybody thinks all Appalachian people are like that. We're not. It's a very rich heritage, and we resent the way we're presented on national media."
ABCNews May 21{"the Appalachian people". I like that. never mind that if you tried to make a show about urban Jews homesteading in Alaska you'd be hounded to extinction, or Puerto Ricans in Westchester, or ghetto blacks in Beverly Hills...southern whites are the only minority left it's socially permissible to ridicule. and while we're tangentializing, the depiction of slavery as merely a vestigial racist institution allows present-day economic slavery to continue unchallenged.}
