The recent attack by Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) on the growing nastiness of the entertainment industry promises to be a feature of the presidential campaign. Dole’s sharp critique won a ready public response, as many ordinary citizens find themselves wondering why we must put up with the rising tide of the bilge pumped at us by the various media machines. This is not just a conservative issue, as President Clinton too demonstrated in his State of the Union message in January. You may remember he got the strongest round of applause for his remark that the entertainment industry must confront its role in promoting the torrent of “mindless violence and irresponsible conduct that permeates our media all the time.” It is still not too late for the president to weigh in on behalf of ordinary decency in the nation. For it is likely that we are in for a debate on this one that will not go away.
Dole and Clinton struck the right note from the start in making it clear that this issue had nothing to do with the 1st Amendment. No one is suggesting that there be any form of censorship or even regulation of the content of the media. The attempt to prohibit obscenity through the courts has largely been ineffective. But the most important reason for disclaiming any 1st Amendment implications is that it removes the last vestige of respectability available to the purveyors of moral slime. The 1st Amendment has too often served as a fig leaf of nobility behind which they can pander to the basest human impulses. By insisting at the start that no one seeks to limit their rights to record and film and broadcast what they wish, it removes the cover of 1st Amendment martyrdom. We can discuss it on its own terms, the debasement of women or the fomenting of racial hatred or the glorification of cruelty or whatever else it happens to be.
So what is the next excuse we are likely to hear from the Hollywood moguls? Sure, we would love to be making good, wholesome movies and recording music that exalts the nobler side of life, but the big bad public won’t pay us to produce such things. Look at the box office returns and the recording receipts. We have to make money too, you know, or our shareholders will flay us alive. Before we become too teary-eyed about the fate of entertainment CEOs, perhaps we should ponder their agonizing predicament more closely.
The proper parallel is really with the polluters of other industries, like steel mills or utilities. They too have to supply what the public demands and they must generate a profit for their shareholders. Yet we don’t allow them to pollute the atmosphere as a regrettable byproduct of their operation. We agree that they do not set out to poison the air we breathe, but we nevertheless insist that they take effective steps to minimize if not eliminate the toxins they disperse along the way. What is so different about the entertainment industry that it cannot be held accountable for the moral pollution of the, even more important, social atmosphere within which we live?
This is not to suggest that we need some kind of moral environmental protection agency. That approach is largely ineffective and likely to cause as much harm as good. Besides in the moral realm there is the major difference that the pollution is all visible and recognizable. As Justice Potter Stewart once said of obscenity in one of the many inconclusive attempts by the U.S. Supreme Court to deal with it, “I can’t define it, but I know what it is when I see it!” Rather than enforcement, what is needed is a change of mindset in our approach to the problem. It is nothing short of the revolutionary notion that major corporations in this country, including the entertainment industry, bear a responsibility for the public atmosphere that they have a pervasive hand in creating. Let us see this become a corporate mentality.
The politicians and journalists, such as John Leo of U.S. News and World Report, are doing no more than pointing out how this sense of corporate responsibility might be evoked. Most obviously it can be promoted by holding specific corporations responsible for particularly offensive products. This has been the significance of singling out Time Warner in the indictments. But why stop there? There are many other companies and the trash they purvey is the work of specific producers within each of them. Why not turn the glare of the very publicity they court on them individually and corporately? Sure they may squirm and be defensive as Michael Fuchs, chairman of Time Warner Music Group, was recently. But if they are ashamed of what they produce then they know it is wrong. Why should we give them any leeway to slime our souls and deform the hearts of our children? Did Exxon or any of the individuals involved get any relief from the glare of publicity when their tanker polluted the waters of Alaska?
