1 The New York Times, in a survey conducted in the summer of 1995, asked what Americans think of American popular culture. In the starkly negative answer the people blamed television as the principal force behind teenage violence and irresponsible sex and, more generally, for its degrading influence on American public standards. More than half of the adults polled could not think of a single positive thing to say about American television, movies or popular music, while nine out of ten had bad things to say about them. They not only objected to sex and violence, but to vulgarity, bias and plain stupidity in the products of the popular cultural industry.

2 Over half believed that movies, television and pop music lyrics contributed “a lot” to teenage violence and sex. The same views were expressed about video games and pop music.

3 Against this popular condemnation of the popular cultural industry, William Pfaff (“Dismay in Desert of the Beaux Arts,” International Herald Tribune, Sept. 7 , 1995) notes a curious alliance of wealth and ideology defends it. Those who profit from providing violent entertainment say it is what the marketplace demands. And they are supported by a civil liberties lobby that denies violence in entertainment has anything to do with how people behave. The latter does this, according to Pfaff, in the name of unlimited freedom of expression in every possible medium, deriving this position from its commitment to the defense of political expression.

4 The American Civil Liberties Union maintains that there is no evidence of a causal connection between television and violence, despite the fact that American business and politicians spend billions of dollars on television because they know that television does influence behavior.

5 Industry says that it gives the public what it wants. It is true that the profits lie in the appeal to what is most base in people. The steady slide of the mass media toward what is most vulgar and demagogic shows the public is implicated in what has happened. Nonetheless, as The Times poll demonstrates, the public is ashamed of itself. It is true that this is hypocrisy. But civilization, certainly the middle-class civilization of the liberal democracies, has always been sustained by the hypocrisy of defending public standards of conduct superior to those that many, or even most, observe in their private lives.

6 The existence of the standard, affirms Pfaff, invites public emulation, exercising an educational and nonnative influence. There is a public desire for high standards in political life. Postwar American presidents have offered either dynamism to reform society, or the maintenance of standards — implicitly, moral and social standards. Today, the appeal of Colin Powell as a possible independent presidential candidate is that he seems to represent a higher standard of public life.

7 Pfaff argues that when public opinion about the standards people want is confronted with a deliberate and cynical political demagogy and with a continuing search by corporations for profit in degrading entertainment — and when these find support from both civil libertarians and believers in the unrestricted marketplace, there has to be a bad outcome. Pfaff concludes that the rage of citizens against the country’s establishment has already provoked violence from one alienated segment of the public, and there is a massive electoral nonparticipation. There is also, as the poll shows, much despair that government or industry will do anything to meet the public’s demands for higher standards. The county’s establishment would do well to heed these serious warnings.