I think the basic inaccuracy of this gripe can be confirmed by a quick spin through basic cable. Most Americans have access to PBS, 2 C-Span channels, several educational networks such as the History Channel and Discovery Channel, and TCM to show the good old fashioned clean movies. Last night, by watching cable TV, I learned that the Colosseum in Rome was connected to an Aqueduct that allowed it to be filled with water, and used to stage massive naval battles. Pretty cool.

But apparently, most people would rather watch American Idol. Or this horrifying new ABC show which promises to be just like American Idol, plus Real World-style voyeurism!

There even used to be a fairly good 24-hour news network, called CNN, but it was utterly destroyed in the ratings by faux-news channels that provide infotainment and quasi-news content filtered through loud, angry, hateful idiots. So, naturally, CNN adapted to compete with the faux-news. Sure, I'd love to see a respectable BBC-caliber American news network. But since I can watch the actual BBC World Report anyway, that's really not necessary.

The problem is not a lack of healthy media content. This is a golden age of documentary filmmaking, and Americans have never had access to more informative and educational media.

The problems are two-fold. One, as you suggest, Americans cannot agree on the distinction between meritorious programming and harmful crap. But more importantly, Americans overwhelmingly prefer crap. They demand it! They binge on stupid sitcoms and faux news, and violent movies, and soft porn, and The View, and then they complain that everyone else is watching crap, and they demand that the government censor other people's crap and leave their preferred crap alone.

The enemy is us. So unless you propose to do away with this whole democracy business and freedom of the press, which I don't recommend, we're sort of stuck with this problem. So I'd suggest just re-upping your HBO subscription, ignoring all the howling jackals of decency and purity, and enjoying the fairly wide selection of both beneficial programming with artistic or educational merit, as well as the entertaining crap.

um Matt-- this post is little more than a self-indulgent paen to a so-so movie. The point is, do you want kids watching it?

Of course the media landscape is full of all sorts of stealthy stuff kids really shouldn't stumble on, and will never be labelled as such--1940s cartoons depicting broad racial stereotypes springs to mind. Whether borderline artsy stuff like "American Psycho" is worse than that by a degree requiring policy intervention seems unlikely.

Never before in history have children been exposed to thousands and thousands of murders and other violent acts and millions of advertisements. Nor have they ever been told except in recent years that it is "normal" for kids to rebel against their parents and make cause with advertisers instead, common wisdom to the contrary (as demonstrated here). Since I don't wish to advocate censorship, I have no solution at present except to recommend additional funds for participatory arts education and programming, since it is hard to go against received opinion.
It does seem reasonable to relegate explicit violence and sexual content to the wee hours, though.

People "want" all sorts of things that are neither good for them or for society at large.

Other than LaFollette Prog's use of 'basic cable' where s/he means 'standard cable,' I fully agree.

It's been quite a few years since my household had cable; we don't watch much TV of any sort. But when we had a standard* cable package, I was amazed by the abundance of quality TV they were making available to me. I just plain didn't have enough hours in the day to watch all the goodies.

*Basic cable is just the local broadcast channels, C-SPAN, usually 2-3 superstations, and maybe a couple of other doodads. No History Channel, no AMC (do they still have that?), no ESPN.

The standard cable package would be the 'what everybody has' kinda package with at least a few dozen channels, but not any specific channels that you had to pay extra for on top of that, like HBO, Disney, etc. But that's a nitpick.

That was a good reply. Though, in the current regulated media environment I see far too many fine varieties of wine being purposefully watered down (or having the alcohol filtered out) just because some one's afraid kids might see them.

Maybe you're right that we need more grape juice for the kids. But we also need a greater variety of wines for the rest of us.

By the way, the novel of American Psycho is far mroe horrifying than the movie and I read that in high school. Come to think of it, the last chapters of The Odyssey, where the hero locks 200 unarmed men in a castle and then slaughters everyone except the poet who he sends off to tell the tale is far more horrifying than anything in American Psycho and I read that in school too.

Violence rocks.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

I'm afraid that, for a good number of Americans, regulating such content to the "wee hours" isn't at all a fair proposition. I pay a cable provider every month, after all. I should have access to good movies at any time, and not be restricted to late night viewings just because some kid might see.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

I don't know about you, but I only watch the Playboy Channel for the articles.

Only because your parents never explained how to get one of those damn things started.

That Huey Lewis voiceover review in "American Psycho" has to be one of the funniest moments in an American movie of the last twenty years.

I will make one point in defense of parents nostalgic for the days of "the Brady Bunch," which is that at least the moralistic schmultz of that era was on some level (and admittedly in the most asinine way possible) liberal. Racism is bad. Be nice to retarded people. Small children with glandular problems are apparently quite endearing (I have no idea what this has to do with liberalism, but it seemed to be central to the formula of television during my coming up).

There is a certain kind of libertarian conservatism that informs the now-dominant reality TV genre. Only the strong, cunning, and highly good looking survive. The unattractive, the un-athletic, and introverted are the first to get voted off the island. What does this tell kids about America?

More than that: these people - even the strong, cunning, and highly good looking - have little or no star power. For all the vacuity of a night of Tartakoff TV, at least you could expect a certain charisma from your television stars. You could expect that the things they said, however silly, were penned by people good at writing that sort of thing, not cheesy ad-libs about how they're like totally in this to win. I liked it better when game show contestants didn't say a word.

Matt

I understand your argument but I have to put my foot down on the "American Psycho" referece. Have you read the novel or even seen the film? If you have then you will know that Bret Easton Ellis, the author, was very accutely patronizing and satirizing the "yuppies" of our society (this particular piece is set in the 1980's). The fiscally conservative, socially liberal "Reaganites" of the 80's are actually analyzed and mocked mercilessly in this story. Any instances of racial biggotry in the novel (or movie) is simply a vehicle by which Easton Ellis promulgates his point of how pathetic yuppies are. In essence they care only about themselves, money drives every aspiration, and the social world they live in is seen only as a way to expose their self-identified superiority to everyone and everything.

In short, "American Psycho" is a very well written novel and the theme and subversive elements are stunningly accurate and brutally honest. Certainly worth a look by everyone.

We live in an age when Rob and Amber's wedding is eligible for prime time TV - and people watch it.

For me, that is almost everything you need to know about these times.

Legend has it that Dalton Trumbo wrote Johnny Got His Gun because of an argument and wager at a cocktail party he attended. At issue was the question of whether fictional exposure to violence and the atrocities of war make warfare more acceptable to people, or whether it would fortify opposition to war. As I recall, Trumbo's position was that it would strengthen people's anti-war resolve. But I think he lost the bet. I wish I could find some reference to this - I read it somewhere.

Neoboho

To that, I must respond with a classic existential comment of one of Spider Robinson's fictional characters in the novella "Mindkiller". If one who commits burglary is a burglar, than God must be an iron, as this world is filled with ever-increasing irony.

There are positive opportunities the like of which we have never seen, and I'm happy to see respected Internet engineers that had responsible roles before they were 21. At the same time, I'm with 12- and 15-year old guests where I'm living. They are clearly intelligent, with the parent I know giving fine heredity. A couple profess to want to do nothing except have a pickup and be good 'ol boys, the financing of said pickup being undefined. The one that actually wants to become a veterinarian seems never to crack a book or do more than laugh at documentaries.

Sadly, we deal with as much Orwellian newspeak in popular culture as in politics. My special ire, I suppose, is reserved for the term "reality TV", for it is the antithesis of reality.

Personally, I watch very little television. That's less a dump on television as that I can absorb information far faster when I read it, and it's difficult for TV to hold my attention. Yes, BBC comedy, Law & Order, and even sports can do so, but too much simply doesn't engage my brain.

While I've never watched "Survivor" and its clones, I came across some news that stunned me. Apparently, in one of the first series, Roy Boehm was voted off as, presumably, a less viable survivor.

Not much, apparently, was said about his background, and I'm not trying to glorify militarism. Boehm, however, is known as the First SEAL, one of the early special operations leaders that developed elimination tests that looked for the people whom, under no circumstances, would quit. His personal record was legendary. I have a certain amount of real-world survival training and experience, mostly advanced Boy Scout adventures, but I can think of few people more likely to lead me out of disaster than Boehm.

I'm not sure what it says to me when a known spirit, such as his, is ignored.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Bev D. wrote: "I agree with the point about advertising, but I would like to point out that for the majority of children worldwide who live in poverty, they daily see the murder, violence, prostitution and war crimes that middle class kids in the U.S. see only in games and on television."

This is not really true. Poverty and violence are not inevitably linked -- though poverty may arguably go along with a degree of cruelty to animals. It is true that people in traditional societies see dead people and animals as a natural occurance. You can argue that media death is phantasmagoric in contrast. But there have been tons of studies, literally thousands, that show a rising level of violence in societies when mass media is introduced. The correlation is as strong as that between smoking and cancer. This is the position of professional associations of pediatricians and psychiatrists. It is something people are not comfortable hearing, however.

"Is this yet a new level of unreality television? I am confident that if I were so kicked, my response would not be laughter or foregiveness."

I agree. In fact, if I happened to be enlisted as an unwilling "contestant" on "Kick In The Nuts," I suspect the producers would soon be guests on a reality show I'm putting together called "Punitive Damages." It'd be a laugh riot.

Seriously, though, I think "Kick In The Nuts" is satire.

And there are also rising or existing levels of violence in traditional societies even without the introduction of mass media. Violence, brutality, poverty, oppression are as old as time immemorial, and there was a time when the introduction of mass media actually helped at times decrease and end such conditions. When I read that comment, the correlation between ignorance and stupidity as related to their willingness to expound on things they haven't a clue about due to their heads being submerged in their a$$holes.

I'm not interested in these facts that are put out there to serve a particular position. What is a more honest statement is that when anything, including mass media (and that can and does include the extreme leftists/neo-progressive movements and organizations) serve narrow agendas and exploit issues for said agendas, then nothing good can come of it, in fact it tends to exacerbate situations..

BTW, the rigamarole about "cruelty to animals" in poorer and traditional societies.. what is it exactly you are labeling as cruelty to animals?

"...watching Arnold doesn't make people shoot their schoolmates."

No, it just makes us grope the women on the elevator!   (Sorry, I just couldn't resist.)  I do agree that watching movies has no noticeable effect on behavior, except for a very brief time immediately afterwards.  My generation, as kids, played war games all the time, making rubber band guns and shooting everyone in sight.  We were as bloodthirsty a group as anyone could imagine, as 10 year olds.  And, we had no TV to blame it on and precious few movies either.  But, as a grown up I can't remember the last time I killed anyone.  (Either bad memory or I never did.)

Hoppy in Sacramento

Still, he must be environmentally friendly. How could you consider "I'll be back" anything other than a plea for recycling?

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

I used to feel like the posters upthread who advocate for full freedom of expression on television. But lately I'm worried about what's happening to our culture. Have we begun the decline of the American Empire? Aren't we being offered bread and circuses? I think people are made jaded, cynical, and overexposed by today's mass media. It takes too long to weed through all the crap out there to find the decent programming, so most people don't bother and their kids watch Jerry Springer. That's why TIVO, which I don't have, is so essential at this point. But the fact that TIVO is essential just illustrates how dependent on television we all are. If I were the judge of our culture, the evidence would indicate that it's fairly regardless of the quality and taste of the programming. (If that Lucky Louie Show on HBO lasts much longer, I'm going to shoot myself) I blame the incredible indifference in modern society on the slow death of shock value and the media quest to bury it deeper. The TV has slowly and progressively desensitized our culture to just about every deadly sin there is: sloth, gluttony, pride, envy, greed, anger, and lust. It's absurd to claim that it hasn't. Every day they push it further. So now, there's no shock left for torture, let alone wire tapping. I'm getting the creeping feeling that, at present, the US has exactly the Administration it deserves and this is just the beginning of the end for America. Our TV culture accepts whatever's on, especially when they actually have to get up off the couch to change the channel.

"Never before in history have children been exposed to thousands and thousands of murders and other violent acts..."

Except for the majority of our country's history when a public hanging was considered occasion for a family picnic by many.

Well, I spent time in Southern Europe as a child and saw several instances of people being cruel to their donkeys -- a man beating his donkey with a big plank (like a two-by four), for example. It was not the norm by any means, but nobody did anything about it. Most people were kind to their donkeys, but killing domestic animals (and castrating them) are part of the yearly round in pastoral societies.

I also was in Spain two years ago and witnessed a small group of five year olds kicking a pigeon to death. It was also far from the norm, but again, no one intervened.

When pigs are slaughtered -- they scream for what seemed like hours, so it seemed to me. But again this was far from a daily occurence.

Have we begun the decline of the American Empire?

I, for one, certainly hope so. 

I'd have to disagree, at least for the 20th and 21st centuries in the US. They were probably more of an entertainment, with no apparent deterrent value, in the UK.

A public hanging is qualitatively different than the violence of television and movie programming. First, it's a judicial procedure, not sending a message that lethal violence is useful to resolve private interpersonal contacts. Second, without electronic aids, most people saw it a distance.

Perhaps balancing that was that deaths from illness often were at home until perhaps the mid-20th century. That's not necessarily beneficial, when hospital interventions actually started to have some benefit, but it does mean there is less exposure to dead bodies.

Children of farmers did see slaughter, but, with the increasing movement away from farms, this is less and less common.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

The Children's Garden.

It's sure lucky we didn't have all that violent television back then.  This "extrajudicial" stuff coulda gotten right outta hand.

Have we begun the decline of the American Empire?

I, for one, certainly hope so.

Ellen, I believe that question and answer that you posted perfectly illustrates the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats... 

I think things were better before Cable gave us way too many options bundled together.

There's something to be said for sheltering children from aspects of "real life" that we may come to appreciate later on...

dlw

A blog-activist dedicated to the reduction of the faith-based political acrimony in the United States of America so as to make our political system more democratic and just and to improve our witness to the rest of the world.

I reserve the right to be a sentimental curmudgeon about the pop culture rubbish of my childhood.

What I find so interesting is many of the same Conservatives who don't think the government should be regulating much of anythign or tellign people how to spend their money is so quick to basically say "oh please save us from ourselves, we can't stop our kids from watchign cable channels we don't like or make them watch good stuff so you need to mandate that only good stuff is on so they can't help but watch it"

Seriously that is in essence what the argument boils down to. There is no shortage of high quality educational programming and edifying entertainment on tons of cable channels and really great childrens movies are readily available from Netflix and so on.

People can't be trusted to find this stuff for themselves and need someone to do it for them on the one hand but at the same time can be trusted to make every other deciscion with no government regulation?

Watching is good. Electing is not.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

I'm reminded of Vin Diesel's line in "Triple X" where he says that the California State Senator (whose Corvette he just stole so he can drive it off a bridge) believes that video games should be removed because they "encourage violence in our youth."

His response: "C'mon, Dick! It's the only education we got!"

Take a look at Jon Stewart's bit about the video game hearings - he winds up accusing the House of being full of "jackasses."

I don't think TV "hurts" kids except in the obvious sense that there are better things they could be doing.

But this has been the basic problem with humans for years - the notion of actually TRAINING a child to survive appears to have died out. In primitive tribes, the child was reared not merely by the parents but by the tribe itself - because the tribe could not afford to have members that were not devoted to - and capable of - enabling the tribe to survive. In industrial societies, the notion that each member of society needs to be trained to function to insure the survival of the society has been mutated into the idea that they must be conditioned to be docile, obedient workers for corporations and cannon fodder for the state.

Clearly, it's not the same thing.

And the results, after some generations of this in the US and elsewhere, clearly show.

TV is not the issue. The complete lack of any concept on the part of parents of appropriate human training is the issue. That and the very concept of the "nuclear family" which is an aberration in human society.

Rarely do I agree with you, but in this case, I do. It was clear to me even from a casual browsing of the book that Ellis was satirizing yuppies.

I mean, he goes on for pages about how the protagonist is going to this restaurant, having this food, dressed in this manner, yada yada, and, oh yeah, by the way, I cut off some girl's head...

It was obviously a parody.

What people don't understand is that Thomas Harris' books, "Red Dragon", "Silence of the Lambs", and "Hannibal" were also satires, not thrillers. I mean, a psychiatrist who is a cannibal? One FBI agent who is so good at thinking like serial killers that he practically is one? Another FBI agent who is a pathetic Fed bitch who is obsessed with saving women because of a lamb? Some people who know Harris have said he has a really black sense of humor - it clearly shows in these novels.

For those old enough to remember, there were complaints about "violence on TV" back in the Seventies. It was based on the predominance of private eye and spy shows.

So what Hollywood did is switch to making the heroes all COPS.

The state will NEVER complain about COP shows where the cops routinely violate the suspect's civil rights.

That worked very well, with crap like "Adam 12" and "Lethal Weapon" and the like until people got tired of it.

Then of course the black demographic took off - we had the blaxploitation movies in the Seventies, and the martial arts movies - the Chinese and Japanese have been showing extremely graphic violence on TV for decades with no apparent ill effects on their children - but then in the Eighties and Nineties, we had all these black crime movies.

And of course the special effects got better - so instead of a show like "The A Team" where NOBODY EVER got hurt even if they got shot - we started seeing major wounds being more or less realistically depicted. This started with a movie called "The Soldier" which depicted an Arab terrorist getting his brains blown out by an Israeli soldier in graphic detail, followed by Chuck Norris's "Missing in Action" which did the same stunt.

As for bad guys being cool, that has almost always been the case - except for the Sixties with the spy shows - and even then the villains tended to be cool. Where the bad guys being cool problem rang true was in the ghetto. The blaxploitation movies were all about cool heroes who happened to be illegal drug dealers or hit men. Here it was obviously race that was the issue, not good vs evil - the whites were evil, the black guys were good, no matter what their job description.

There were white equivalents - Charles Bronson in one of my favorite movies of all time, "The Mechanic" - which did have a profound effect on me - namely, the idea that a Mafia hit guy could actually be a smart, well trained, and imaginative hit man - instead of some Italian bozo with a pistol, as depicted by the book, "Joey". Not to mention Bronson's "Death Wish" movies.

"Dirty Harry" was a bit later, and Ah-nuld was late to the game.

The shift was reflected in comic books as well. As a life long comic book reader, back in the Sixties, Marvel introduced new "realism" into comics, as opposed to DC. In the Seventies, with the rise of Don Pendleton's "Executioner" fiction novels, Marvel created the genre of the "crazy superhero" - Wolverine and the Punisher, the latter explicitly modeled after Pendleton's character.

Later, Frank Miller came up with "The Dark Knight" - the recreation of Batman as a paranoid psycho, later reflected in the Batman movies.

None of it matters. The real psychological issues are one's relationship with society and the state. And with the state and society assuming more and more control over the individual, the natural tendency to rebellion ever increases - until eventually enough "individuals" get together and trash the state and society.

The rise of social and state despotism is mirrored by the rise in violence on the individual level.

The Situationists explained all this back in the Sixties. They explained the Watts riots as the natural and correct response to the "chill violence" of the corporate state.

I agree that the alternatives are out there. We have raised our child on PBS kids shows and documentaries, and TCM. That is it. As a result, she is keenly inquisitive, and has a deep love and appreciation for old movies. If TCM ever goes the way of AMC, we'll be dumping cable.

I find parents of her friends generally clueless, and allow their kids to watch any old crap. That includes Nickleodeon, which is raising a nation of obnoxious brats, and movies that are clearly inappropriate for anyone under 12 (say Jurassic Park, Jaws, ....). But more than anything, I object to the constant exposure of kids to commercial adverisements, that is training those kids for empty lives straining to meet material expectations that are being inculcated in them.

For anyone that doesn't see the harm in it, look at a nation that wants SUVs and McMansions, and will happily mortgage their children's futures and the environmental future of the planet to maintain the standard of living that they have been led to believe they deserve.

As far as violent content, probably the best TV drama ever is I Claudius. That show included a scene where someone rips his baby out of his sister's womb and eats it whole (admittedly off camera). In the context, it really was appropriate. So I'm not in favor of censoring content generally. OTOH any parent who allowed their kid to view that scene ought to be imprisoned.

One reason public execution fell out of favor is that children imitated it in their play and hung each other.

It has convinced psychiatric and other health professionals.

That is because culture is always declining. It is like other man-made creations -- like a road or watermain system that has to be entirely rebuilt -- with improvements and repairs, with every new generation, that is, every twenty years -- in effect, continuously. It does not mean that the decline (deterioration) is not real, far from it. The decline, like the rebuilding, is continuous, that is why everyone is constantly screaming about it. They have very good reason.

 This could easily become a thread all on its own, but the single greatest achievement of mankind is grasping the history of the universe, from the instant of the "big bang" to today.  And, it is a work in progress.

Hoppy in Sacramento