By
Nick Zeckets
Investigators for the Federal Trade Commission are drawing their report on violence in the media to a close after nearly a year of inquiry. Heading the commission is Senator John McCain of Arizona. The study is being lauded as a new weapon in the anti-Hollywood crusade. Politicians, however, need to look elsewhere before blaming entertainment execs.
According to the FTC investigation, movie companies have been advertising R-rated films during television programs watched primarily by teens and in magazines directed towards the American teenage market.
Senator Joseph Lieberman, Democratic vice-presidential nominee, hopes to testify sometime next month on the issue of media-fostered violence. The democratic party doesn't want him talking because many of their high rolling contributors are Hollywood bigwigs. The rest of us don't want him talking because he has no clue what he's talking about. While we're at it, let's put an environmental activist in charge of the economy...oh, that would be Al Gore if he's elected.
After the deaths of 13 students and teachers in the Littleton, Colo. shootings, President Bill "Puff-Puff-Give" Clinton ordered the joint FTC-Justice Department study. Clinton's push came after legislation penned by both McCain and Lieberman. The exact content of the study is unknown as FTC spokesman Eric London has refused to comment and continues to be unavailable for comment.
Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) indicated that his group has done all it can to appropriately rate and control movies. However, out of sight and out of mind are the wee little ones sneaking under the gun to watch movies which their birth certificates don't qualify them for. Valenti, the FTC and Washington don't know Jack.
Capitol Hill is on a mission to shut the movie industry down. Why? Who the hell knows? More importantly, First Amendment rights are being limited when a film is caged.
For years, millions of people have been watching violent films, with very few of them even seeing a gun in person, nevertheless wielding it or any other deadly instrument in the course of taking another's life. Right wingers and the hopelessly conservative are holding on to their dear Protestant backgrounds.
Oddly enough, Lieberman is a Jew in a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant's game. Where his fervor stems from is questionable, but it's undoubtedly there. However, whether the crap is spewed by a WASP, Jew or Barney the dinosaur, it doesn't matter. It's still crap.
Apart from the MPAA, video game producers and television programmers are feeling the heat from the FTC and a report that, as of yet, has no face and no understood implications. The sad reality for Washington's witch hunters is that there is no true correlation between real violence and what flashes across a TV or computer screen.
Look at Jeffrey Dahmer. At a young age he brought home a cat. Then to teach him some sick lesson, his father made him cut the feline up and flush it down the toilet. Now that will turn a kid into something less than normal. Schwarzeneger movies? Not a chance. All anyone got from those was a size complex for being weak and scrawny.
Politicians need to start looking at what exactly it is that makes children revert to violence apart from violent media. That's not the answer. Perhaps being left alone, beaten, psychological disorders, or something else drives America's youth to bust caps in their homies.
When the report is finally published and speculation ends, the dust will settle with 8,000 pages of miscellaneous statistics and extrapolations laden with fallacies. Lieberman and McCain will be forced to quiet the campaign against the media for a while and find a new mindless conservative issue to draw voters from.
Violence among our nation's youth is probably attributable to a number of things, issues that may one day make it into this section, but for now the only conclusion that can be asserted is that the media is not at fault. Ideas are very different from actions and to point the finger at something easy isn't fighting the problem. Media is for entertainment, not the transmission of the devil's deeds.
