Recent commentary from National Journal:
Legal Affairs: Let's Make the Federal Hate Crimes Law Broader -- Much Broader, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (September 19, 2000)
Why not add to the list of hate crimes those motivated by indifference to life or health?
Political Pulse: A Duke-Out Over ... Paradigms, by William Schneider (September 19, 2000)
Amazingly, this campaign is turning out to be a big debate on fundamental issues.
The Campaign: On the Air -- RATS, Ratings, Hypocrisy, and Tiny Tim, by Carl M. Cannon (September 19, 2000)
Politicians are beginning to point out that television is the emperor wearing no clothes.
Social Studies: Don't Pardon Ex-President Clinton -- Commute His Sentence, by Jonathan Rauch (September 13, 2000)
An ex-President jailed? The spectacle would be wrenching, the symbolism right out of some banana republic.
Legal Affairs: Boy Scouts Vs. Gays -- The System Is Working Just Fine, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (September 13, 2000)
A thousand points of pressure are being applied to the Scouts to yield to the emerging social consensus.
Media: Reality Politics, Anyone?, by William Powers (September 13, 2000)
Perhaps the presidential campaigns could take some cues from CBS' new reality-TV series.
Political Pulse: Clinton -- Just Doing His Job, by William Schneider (September 13, 2000)
President Clinton is sending a message: this campaign is not about me.
The Campaign: A Sitting President Cannot Disappear, Nor Should He, by Carl M. Cannon (September 13, 2000)
Thank goodness Bill Clinton rode to the rescue and helped set the tone for the campaign.
More from National Journal.
Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte.
Media:Wallflowers in Paradise
Oh, how we love a federal report! And important studies by major government agencies, like the Federal Trade Commission's new report on Hollywood violence and kids, they're the best.
They're instant news, no digging required. Give us a stack of paper with a government seal on it, and we'll give you a front-page headline in 10 minutes. Skimming is our specialty.
When the government takes on some evildoer like Firestone or the entertainment industry, we get to be pure observers, watching the battle from front-row seats, but never having to jump in ourselves. It's a sweet return to the wallflower-with-a-notebook mode we favored as teenagers, when we were just discovering journalism.
This violence study is pure cotton candy. It's got everything -- movie stars, kids, violence, greed, lies, hypocrisy, freedom, censorship -- and we get to just watch and scribble.
One glance at the Post's A-1 story on Monday, and every savvy soul in Washington knew this was going to be a tasty week. Plus, there was that story, the very same morning, about Susan Sarandon saying George W. Bush, through the Texas death penalty, "has probably killed more people before he gets into office than any President in the history of the United States."
Gen. Eisenhower would probably give Bush a run for his money in the pre-White House killing sweepstakes, but the factual accuracy of Sarandon's remark wasn't the issue. It was her cheek. On the very day the FTC report leaked, and it became clear that the entertainment industry has been doing everything it can to plunge kids into a culture of death and violence, here was an extremely powerful member of that industry claiming the high ground on, yup, death and violence.
Reading the FTC findings and the Sarandon stories side by side is about as heavenly as it gets in this media life. Also heavenly was watching all the opportunists grab that report by the collar, like a little circus dog, and put it to work for their own purposes. As Bill Clinton did right away, in a speech up in Scarsdale. He brilliantly employed every journalist's favorite quote from Plato ("those who tell the story, rule society") as a lead-in to his real point about the violence study: "This validates what Hillary has been saying for years." Al Gore went on Oprah and pointed out that, actually, this is what Tipper has been saying for years, and also Joe Lieberman. Candidate Bush used the report to trash Gore, though, stupidly, he didn't note that this is what Laura's been saying for years. But Lynne Cheney's been saying it for years, too, and she was already on the witness list for the inevitable congressional hearing on the report.
The hearing was a gas, except this weird feeling kept welling up inside us, and try as we might to suppress it, it wouldn't go away. As First Amendment enthusiasts, we get more than a little heartburn watching these government officials (Lieberman), and spouses of government officials (Tipper and Lynne) making all this noise about the content of movies and music and games. Our gut tells us public officials aren't really the best people to criticize Hollywood because of the undertone of threatened censorship.
But then, who's going to say something? We can't really expect movie stars like Sarandon to take up arms against the big companies that sign their paychecks. And the public, worried though it may be about kids and violence, is putty in the hands of Hollywood, so there's no hope they'll change things.
In fact, it occasionally dawns on us that there's really only one set of people in a position to solve this problem: us. We're an extremely influential crowd. We cover all these federal reports and hearings and decide what play to give them. We also write, edit, and publish every movie and video review you'll ever see, and have a gigantic influence on ticket sales, and thus on Hollywood's product. And when those reviews fail to distinguish intelligently between movie violence that is art and movie violence that is garbage (because there's a difference), and simply cheerlead 98 percent of what Hollywood puts out, then Hollywood starts to think 98 percent of what it puts out is good.
We pressies are plugged in to the entertainment business at the highest levels. We have Jack Valenti over for dinner. We see Spielberg at parties in the Hamptons. We're ideally situated to take on this crisis, to make the entertainment establishment quake.
There's just one tiny problem. We're not so thrilled about taking on Hollywood. Why? First, it's extremely uncool to question pop culture, especially on serious artistic or moral grounds. It's, like, so judgmental. Second, it's bad business. Media outlets sell their products by piggybacking on the Hollywood hype machine, thus all those soft magazine cover stories about new movies, even raging turkeys like last year's Eyes Wide Shut. Third, Hollywood types increasingly sign our paychecks, thanks to all these media mergers. Fourth, we might want to work there someday, have a second career in the movies as Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, and so many other journalists have done.
Besides, it's so much nicer -- and easier -- to be a wallflower, just waiting for the next important federal report to come along.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte.
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William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C.
For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com.
All material copyright © 2000 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
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