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Whenever parents raise these concerns, the entertainment industry invokes the evil specter of censorship. But the U.S. has always had censorship. Even MTV has its own censors. What is truly strange is the argument that there should be no censorship whatsoever. Should hard-core pornography be allowed on + prime-time, broadcast TV? Are there no limits? No society can survive if its only rule is, "Anything goes."
So the question becomes, "What goes?" In general, this question should be answered not by governments but by artists, disk jockeys, producers, theater owners and media executives. There are no simple formulas for what is permissible. And there is always a serious danger that high-quality, progressive art will be stifled for the sake of community standards. But much commercial trash, crassly produced to exploit the vulnerable minds of young people, is easy to identify.
No one is suggesting that society police every nightclub and root out every raunchy record from store shelves. There will always be filth on the fringes of entertainment. The problem arises when filth becomes mainstream, when it is mass-marketed. A few giant corporations, including Disney, Fox, MCA, Paramount, Time Warner, Britain's EMI, West Germany's Bertelsmann and Japan's Sony, produce a huge proportion of our children's entertainment. Many parents feel that these companies should take the lead in setting the standards for everyone.
No rock group should be banned entirely, but perhaps some of them should lose their well-financed promotional campaigns. Entertainment firms have a responsibility to society that must be balanced with their mission to maximize profits for shareholders. Parents are now giving media executives a warning: "Make your marketing decisions more responsibly, or we will get governments to make them for you." That is a real threat, at least at the state and local level, and the very idea alarms anyone who values the First Amendment.
Can the media companies mend their ways without government interference? There is certainly a precedent for it. In the 1960s and '70s, much entertainment, from Beatles music to the movies Easy Rider and M*A*S*H, glamourized drug use. But at some point, the world's artists, producers and media executives decided that promoting drugs was not a good thing. Nowadays the message that children receive from entertainment is strong and unambiguous: drugs are dangerous, and taking them is foolish. I hope that the future messages my two boys receive about sex and violence make just as much sense.