One way for journalism to make itself useful would be for the press to start telling the truth about pop culture and our social problems. Yet since way before the birth of rock and roll, and right on through the hip hop, video, and computer phases, the media has advanced and disseminated the falsehood that popular culture is responsible for moral and social decay. As a consequence, many Americans now believe it.
Politicians inevitably exploit this misguided belief. But at its heart, the raging debate about culture, values, new media, and technology is about truth, not morals.
Some truths we don't know or don't want to face:
Censorship is dead. The Internet and other new technologies have killed it. The information in the lives of children will never again be controllable or censorable.
Children need more access to technology, and culture, not less. They have the right to access it, especially if they're taught how to use it and they behave responsibly. Yet children are the last significant group in American life to be perceived as having no rights of any sort, and no voice in decisions affecting them.
Morality is an individual choice. There is no single definition of it. No one has the right to tell us what is moral, what is art, what we have the right to see, read, and hear.
There is plenty of garbage on TV, in movies, and on CDs. There are hundreds of studies measuring the explicit imagery in screen culture, and some that show prolonged exposure to isn't healthy, any more than overeating and other excesses are. But there is little or no evidence it's harming well-raised children or causing our social problems.
Parents are frightened. Their fears need to be addressed openly and honestly. They would be less fearful if they were told the truth about where violence comes from and how it might be alleviated.
Journalism needs to do its job, and to stop being drawn into cultural conflicts and exploited by manipulative politicians. It needs to understand that our culture is becoming less free and creative and more cautiously market-driven, and that economic censorship is a powerful force that is threatening and altering culture and freedom. This is as big a threat to journalism as it is to everyone else.
Here's how reporter Michael Kelly described William Bennett in a New Yorker profile two years ago: Bennett, said Kelly, (now editor of the New Republic) is "inarguably an opportunist. He is also something of a bully, an overbearing ex-jock who traffics in confrontation and intimidation rather than reasoned discourse. He is rude ... He is a Barnumesque sensationalist, a light-fingered popularizer of others' ideas, and an unregenerate middlebrow ... He is a self-promoting, self-important sermonizer."
Who better to serve as journalism's reigning King of Moral Virtues?
There is nothing in Bennett's life or political career - no vote, achievement, or background - that qualifies him to be a determining force in the music we listen to or the movies and television programs we see - or to serve as a national spokesman for values.
Bennett's assault on rap, TV, and other forms of pop culture are absurd as well as arrogant. Raunchy daytime talk shows are losing ratings rapidly, demonstrating how cyclical these movements in culture are. And rap music is moderating all by itself, without his moral posturing or fables. "There is a new mournful, reflective ethos in gangsta rap," Michael Eric Dyson, an author, critic, and student of black culture, said this week. These issues are between artists and customers, parents and their kids. Like the academics who tally TV violence all day, Bennett ought to go out and get some work.
It is a pity, Mencken wrote decades ago, that democracy offers too few plausible alternatives to its citizens. What democracy needs most of all, he wrote, is a party that will separate the good in it from the evils that beset it practically.
"What it needs beyond everything is a party of liberty," Mencken declared.
Clearly, the Republican and Democratic parties aren't much interested in that job. The Net is the freest culture in America. Some call it the Fifth Estate. Bennett, greedy opportunist that he is, will be knocking at our doors any day now. When he and his legions come for us - and you can hear the rifle bolts clicking - we could, if we choose, become that party.
