Media and Moral Responsibility

In the October 22 Chronicle of Higher Education, George Marsden notes the high proportion of "seriously religious Americans," but points out that:

"our culture is also strikingly secular, even profane.  Part of the paradox is explained by the many essential activities in a technological capitalist society like ours that allow little room for religious groups to exercise substantive control.  Our government is officially separated from religions and depends on coalitions that can bring people with different beliefs together.  Businesses serve diverse markets and focus on what will turn a profit.  The media's commitments to freedom, diversity, and profit foster mass entertainments that would have shocked older religious sensibilities."

In today's New York Times, Frank Rich has a (not suprisingly) less nuanced take:

"There's . . . one problem with the storyline proclaiming that the country swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004. Like so many other narratives that immediately calcify into our 24/7 media's conventional wisdom, it is fiction. Everything about the election results - and about American culture itself - confirms an inescapable reality: John Kerry's defeat notwithstanding, it's blue America, not red, that is inexorably winning the culture war, and by a landslide. . . .

The blue ascendancy is nearly as strong among Republicans as it is among Democrats. Those whose "moral values" are invested in cultural heroes like the accused loofah fetishist Bill O'Reilly and the self-gratifying drug consumer Rush Limbaugh are surely joking when they turn apoplectic over MTV. William Bennett's name is now as synonymous with Las Vegas as silicone. The Democrats' Ashton Kutcher is trumped by the Republicans' Britney Spears. Excess and vulgarity, as always, enjoy a vast, bipartisan constituency, and in a democracy no political party will ever stamp them out.

If anyone is laughing all the way to the bank this election year, it must be the undisputed king of the red cultural elite, Rupert Murdoch. Fox News is a rising profit center within his News Corporation, and each red-state dollar that it makes can be plowed back into the rest of Fox's very blue entertainment portfolio. The Murdoch cultural stable includes recent books like Jenna Jameson's "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" and the Vivid Girls' "How to Have a XXX Sex Life," which have both been synergistically, even joyously, promoted on Fox News by willing hosts like Rita Cosby and, needless to say, Mr. O'Reilly. There are "real fun parts and exciting parts," said Ms. Cosby to Ms. Jameson on Fox News's "Big Story Weekend," an encounter broadcast on Saturday at 9 p.m., assuring its maximum exposure to unsupervised kids.

Almost unnoticed in the final weeks of the campaign was the record government indecency fine levied against another prime-time Fox television product, "Married by America." The $1.2 million bill, a mere bagatelle to Murdoch stockholders, was more than twice the punishment inflicted on Viacom for Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction."

None of this has prompted an uprising from the red-state Fox News loyalists supposedly so preoccupied with "moral values." They all gladly contribute fungible dollars to Fox culture by boosting their fair-and-balanced channel's rise in the ratings. . . .

Mr. Murdoch and his fellow cultural barons - from Sumner Redstone, the Bush-endorsing C.E.O. of Viacom, to Richard Parsons, the Republican C.E.O. of Time Warner, to Jeffrey Immelt, the Bush-contributing C.E.O. of G.E. (NBC Universal) - are about to be rewarded not just with more tax breaks but also with deregulatory goodies increasing their power to market salacious entertainment. It's they, not Susan Sarandon and Bruce Springsteen, who actually set the cultural agenda Gary Bauer and company say they despise."

Rich raises some good points, but voting based on media culture seems a fairly tricky business, especially given both parties' failures in this area.  And while government certainly has a role to play, get-tough government measures are not necessarily the perfect remedy, as they bring their own unfortunate and often unintended consequences (see, e.g., stations pulling "Saving Private Ryan" for fear of FCC penalties).  Even grass-roots protests seem ineffective, serving only to bring free publicity to the disfavored project (see, e.g., the outrage over the new film about Alfred Kinsey, sure to boost its box office).  Perhaps this is another area where cultural change begins at home, with engaged parents who not only monitor their children's viewing habits and teach discerning media consumption, but also practice what they preach.  (As Mister Rogers said, "The television may be the only electrical applicane that's more useful after it's been turned off.")  A seemingly hopeless cause, I admit, but maybe part of building a culture of life is reversing the culture of coarseness, one family at a time.

Rob