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The Media at Work

It is widely assumed among conservatives that the media is bringing our civilization to its knees. Many on the Left scoff at the indictment for they equate the narcissistic, secular, value-free, sex-in-your-face, obscenity ridden style of life so popular in the media with freedom and even intellectual respectability. The Culture War, a struggle between largely articulate minorities on the Left and Right, is very real, and polls show that increasingly the public as a whole is moving in the direction favored by leftists. Here are summaries of some recent items about the media that shed light on the issue.

1. Medical researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, reviewing the words of the 279 most popular songs of 2005, discovered that a third of the songs contained explicit references to substance abuse. Two-thirds of the songs placed drugs, alcohol, and tobacco in a positive light, associating them with sex, humor, and partying. The songs represented hits in country, pop, R&B, rap, and rock music. The same researchers estimate that Americans age 15 to 18 listen to 2.4 hours of music daily. So young people hear 84 musical references a day and 30,000 references a year to substance use. See www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/NO1447372.htm.

2. A group called Enough Is Enough has for months been organizing and demonstrating against the negative images of blacks shown on television, especially the channels owned by Viacom—MTV, BET, and VH1. The mostly African-American organization is attempting to develop “universal creative standards.” According to a story of November 5, 2007 in the New York Times, “Enough Is Enough says it wants companies to develop standards that include prohibitions on: racial and sexual slurs; the promotion of illegal activity like drug use; as well as content that ‘objectifies, degrades, or promotes violence against women’ or shows black and Latino men as pimps or gangsters.” BET reaches 85 million households, and is acknowledged to be the premier channel for black content. The NAACP and the National Congress of Black Women are also campaigning for more corporate responsibility over the content of the programming. The movement has its critics, of course, who warn of censorship. Courtland Milloy, a Washington Post columnist, has linked Enough Is Enough with the Taliban. Todd Boyd, A movie professor at USC, sneers, “People are less interested in broad representation than in hand-picking the images they approve of.” See www.enoughisenoughcampaign.com/pastor.html.

3. Another organization calling itself Enough Is Enough is working to protect children and families from the dangers of pornography and sexual predators on the Internet. The Internet pornographic film industry now brings in about $12 billion a year in this country alone. Every 39 minutes a new porno video is made in the United States. Every day, search engines handle some 68 million requests for one or more of the more than 4 million pornographic websites. Cell phone pornography is now a booming business. Some 93% of Americans between the ages of 12 and 17 are on the Internet. How many kids of the same age have cell phones? See www.enough.org.

4. The conservative Media Research Center documents left-wing media bias on a daily basis. But the 20th annual awards for the year’s worst reporting, released on December 17, 2007, merits special consideration, if only because it makes hilarious reading and watching. See www.mediaresearch.org/welcome.asp. The dubious honor of the worst Notable Quote of the year went to the McClatchy News Service, for a headline that attempted to defuse good news from Iraq: “As violence falls in Iraq, cemetery workers feel the pinch.” The first runner-up went to MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann in Playboy: “Al Qaeda really hurt us, but not as much as Rupert Murdoch has hurt us, particularly in the case of Fox News. Fox News is worse than Al Qaeda—worse for our society. It’s as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan ever was.” Here are two more examples. Chris Matthews to Barack Obama at the Democratic candidates’ forum: “So much of what you say just grabs people like me, because it sounds like Bobby Kennedy. It sounds like the ‘60s at its absolute best.” Jonathan Darman and Mark Hosenbell in a Newsweek article on “The New War on Hillary”: “It’s her resilience and capacity to survive and thrive against all comers that partly fuels the haters’ fury….Installed in Washington, Hillary morphed into a comic-book villain for her detractors—a man-eating feminist, they claimed, who allegedly threw lamps at her husband, communed psychically with Eleanor Roosevelt and lit a White House Christmas tree adorned with sex toys. The narrative of depravity—a tissue of inventions by conservatives—was often hard to follow….The anti-Hillary industry has never managed to bring down Hillary herself—in fact, the more they have attacked, the higher she has risen.” Ah, all that award-winning, high priced objectivity.