Seeking an Antidote to Toxic Media. The FCC has announced that it believes Congress can act to curb excessive violence in televised entertainment. The usual suspects have expressed alarm that our 'right' to be psychologically poisoned is being threatened. But some surprising ad-hoc coalitions may emerge.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said he will file legislation that may incorporate some of the commission's recommendations.

Let's be clear on what the First Amendment does and does not cover. Read the text. This is the entire First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Those 45 words are the only protections of "expression" in the U.S. Constitution. They include religious worship, speech, the press, assembly, and petition. That's it. It does not cover art or entertainment. Period. It just plain does not cover the arts, of any kind. It does not cover images: not statues, not paintings, not fotos, not videos. It does not protect graphic depictions of violence and death as entertainment. It just doesn't.
+
The visual and nonspeaking parts of video, TV, film, and the Internet are not technological extensions of speech but of visual arts known to the Framers of the Constitution: drawing, painting, caricature, cartooning, sculpture; dance; music. Art is not protected by the First Amendment. If you doubt it, just read the 45 words that comprise the entire text of that Amendment. There is no mention of "art", nor of music, nor dance, nor anything else of any kind but (1) religion, (2) speech, (3) the press, (4) assembly, and (5) petition.
+
All other "expression" is outside the Constitution and is NOT protected by the First Amendment. Technologies not known by the Framers must be judged in terms of whether they are reasonable extensions of the protected forms of expression, or NOT.
+
A bullhorn and other forms of sound amplification, and broadcasting of speech, may be regarded as extensions of speech. But freedom of speech does not mean the right to blast the entire vicinity or world with oppressive sound, nor to shout down less powerful voices. So government may properly restrict the scope of amplification to protect people from imposition.
+
"Speech" in the First Amendment actually means what it seems to mean: words said aloud by one individual human being to others within earshot. Constitutional protection of speech was afforded to keep people from being oppressed merely for speaking their mind among friends and family, to keep what later came to be known as Big Brother from listening in and punishing people for disapproved thoughts. It really relates fundamentally (a) to private conversations and (b) to public policy discussions.
+
In the first case, the First Amendment forbids Government to intrude on private conversations.
+
In the second, it forbids Government from acting to stifle political discussion and action to rally democratic opposition to Government behavior, or to replace the members of elected bodies.
+
The First Amendment was basically intended to protect privacy and dissent, and in regard to speech that reaches many people, to protect political expression, not storytelling or other frivolous entertainments.
+
Realize that the Constitution was written at a time when the largest possible number of people a single person's voice might reach was on the order of 2,000 in a theater or amphitheater of the best acoustical construction. Might the Framers have written a different text for the First Amendment if they had understood that technology would make it possible for a single person to reach hundreds of millions with an intemperate utterance?
+
(The era in which the Framers lived was also a time when the most dangerous weapon an individual might carry was a musket that could fire only once every minute or two. Might the Second Amendment have been written differently if the Framers understood that we would one day create guns that, in the hands of a lunatic, could fire 170 bullets into dozens of college students before police could arrive? I suspect it would.)
+
What is a reasonable technological extension of "the press"? Well, what is the nature of the press? It is a passive medium. You have to go out of your way to find a newspaper or book, then devote time and effort to read its words, in order to derive any information or experience any emotional reaction to what is contained in the press. Not so television, which invades the most private parts of our personal world and slaps us in the face with graphic violence even when we are just channel-surfing or sitting thru commercials. So, television and film in the home — one admittedly does have to seek out a first-run movie in a theater, but one does not necessarily know what s/he will see on first entering the theater — are qualitatively different, in a hugely meaningful way, from "the press".
+
They are not by any fair-minded evaluation the exact equivalent of a book. A book has covers. A newspaper has multiple pages, most of which are hidden at any given time. To make any sense of a book, newspaper, or magazine, one has to actively read the print. Not so, graphic images. Note that canvases and statues are not in any way even implicitly protected by the First Amendment. The Framers knew about art. They were cultured men. When the First Amendment was written, they did not include art as a protected category of "expression", and in fact the First Amendment does NOT protect just any and every conceivable form of "expression". It protects religion, speech, the press, assembly, and petition. That is all.
+
(Among the many other things it does not protect are teeshirts, rude gestures, tattoos, piercings, nudity, and other forms of marginally or flagrantly antisocial behavior. Read the text of the First Amendment. I defy you to find even an implied right of giving the finger to TV cameras or assaulting the world with nudity, enormous tattoos visible to the general public, or piercings that disgust the bulk of the population.)
+
Hyperviolent television and film is NOT Constitutionally protected, not by any stretch of the imagination of reasonable and honest people. Blood-spattered windows and disemboweled bodies, cars tossed in the air by explosions, and the whole panoply of psychotic, sado-masochistic violence that fills television and film are NOT protected by the First Amendment.
+
And it's not just children who need to be protected from sociopathic sado-masochists in media. There is no "erase" button on the human memory. What sears itself into your brain stays in your brain, possibly for life. Many World War II veterans have experienced nitemares and flashbacks 50 and more years after they left the battlefield, and may indeed have suffered those appalling recollections to the very last instant of their lives, dying from a heart attack triggered by memories of terrible things they saw when young men, that scarred them for life. How many people remember vividly, decades later, the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 shocker, Psycho? key scenes from Jaws (1975)? How long will it take for the images of the collapsing World Trade Center towers to leave our memories? Will those visions ever leave our heads?
+
It's one thing to face reality, unpleasant, indeed horrifying, tho it might be, in news reports. It's quite another to allow some degenerate loser with sociopathic sado-masochistic obsessions to inflict his (or, less commonly, her) nitemarish fantasies upon millions in the name of "entertainment". I've said it before and will say it again, much of today's output of "dramas" on television and film is entertainment for Nazis, the kind of thing SS guards at Auschwitz would have loved.
+
Violence as entertainment is not Constitutionally protected speech. It's not speech at all. Pictures are not speech. Visual sequences on film or video are not speech. Speech is speech. And everybody knows it.
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,346 — for Israel.)


- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM