peggy noonan sounds in over our increasingly crass culture

Those who have read my "sympathy for the devil" article knows that I do not like the negative influence that mass media, especially televsion, is having on the American culture. For the one or two programs that might be held up as shining examples of all that's good and right in the USA, there's a hundred that make you wonder why anyone would waste there time with TV.

Now, Peggy Noonan sounds in with the same concern I have, and that is the fear factor that television is bringing to the lives of children (let alone adults!). Here's an excerpt from here recent column in the Wall Street Journal (do yourself a favor and subscribe--best journalism in the USA is in the pages of the Journal.)

For 50 years in America, whenever the subject has turned to what our culture presents, the bright response has been, "You don't like it? Change the channel." But there is no other channel to change to, no safe place to click to. Our culture is national. The terrorizing of children is all over.

Click. Smug and menacing rappers.

Click. "This is Bauer. He's got a nuke and he's going to take out Los Angeles."

Click. Rosie grabs her crotch. "Eat this."

Click. "Every day 2,000 children are reported missing . . ."

Click. Don Imus's face.

Click. "Eyewitnesses say the shooter then lined the students up . . ."

Click. An antismoking campaign on local New York television. A man growls out how he felt when they found his cancer. He removes a bib and shows us the rough red hole in his throat. He holds a microphone to it to deliver his message.

Don't smoke, he says.

This is what TV will be like in Purgatory.

It's not only roughness and frightening things in our mass media, it's politics too. Daily alarms on global warming with constant videotape of glaciers melting and crashing into the sea. Anchors constantly asking, "Is there still time to save the Earth? Scientists warn we must move now." And international terrorism. "Is the Port of Newark safe, or a potential landing point for deadly biological weapons?"

I would hate to be a child now.

SOURCE: The Wall Street Journal: 27 APRIL 2007: We're Scaring Our Children to Death

So would I. We live in a culture of violence and fear that is 99% the creation of our mass media. It doesn't have to be that way, but sensationalism sells, and fear mongering is the best sort of sensationalism.

HAT TIP: Relapsed Catholic

<>< TM