I feel sure the solution, whatever it might be, won’t be an all or nothing one, however.

But, as with the thousands of studies of smoking, alcohol, and junk food, people like Michael Berube just can’t or won’t to take the information in, because it is just too difficult reconcile it with the conflicting ideal that censorship is bad (in every case without exception) and with people’s own individual perceptions of the undoubted benefits of television and also of its highly pleasurable and rewarding qualities, which are indisputable.

I’m sorry, I’m missing the passage in which I said “everything on TV is good and TV is good for you.” Was it a Hidden Message in comment 190?

But, as with the thousands of studies of smoking, alcohol, and junk food, people like Michael Berube just can’t or won’t to take the information in, because it is just too difficult reconcile it with the conflicting ideal that censorship is bad (in every case without exception) and with people’s own individual perceptions of the undoubted benefits of television and also of its highly pleasurable and rewarding qualities, which are indisputable. Unfortunately, however, a lot of highly pleasurable and convenient things are not without cost. Also, who wants to go around with placards being a prophet of gloom and doom. For those who want to be successful in life it just won’t do.

Right. The problem (I mean, Frank’s problem) is: what does the fact that so many Middle Americans think that most popular culture sucks have to do with their support for deregulation, de-unionization, privatization, regressive taxation, “free” trade, and the rest of the Republican agenda?

Frank’s answer is that Republicans 1) do not talk much, and then only in the most threadbare slogans, about their economic program; 2) talk a lot instead about how secular, cosmopolitan liberals and leftists are responsible for everything about popular culture that offends the Middle Americans; 3) promise, rather vaguely, to fix these things if the MA’s help elect the Repubs; 4) when elected, do practically nothing to change those things that offend the MAs, partly because the people who are really doing many or most of those things are not liberals and leftists but powerful industries, and partly because if the Repubs did remove the MA’s grievances, the MAs might begin to pay more attention to how the Republican economic program is affecting them and their communities.

I’m not sure how the Frankfurt School comes into all this.

Man, you’re swinging wildly. The answers are no and yes, but this is actually a serious question, not a referendum on the CPB. Quite throwing kitchen sinks at me.

For kids, certainly below the age of about 10, but above that age too, TV is reality. It is the most powerful educational medium we have, and it is devoted to advertising and titillation.

If you want someone other than you (or your spouse/co-parent/etc.) to be the gatekeeper between the world of adult ideas (which includes TV and the Internet) and your child, you are going to be disappointed. Who else would you trust with that role anyway? Your standards for what you want your child exposed to are different from other parents’ standards and society can’t enforce all of them at once.

TV is pervasive in this society. In order to keep kids away from TV, beyond not having a TV yourself, or keeping the controls away from your kids (very hard to do!), you’d have to keep them out of public places and away from other kids’ families. Now, this is what social conservatives do. And they’re blamed for it. And they actually wish they didn’t have to do it.

But you don’t have the right or the authority to stop the conversation.

Oh, that’s right. I’m trying to stop the conversation of democracy, the dialogue of civilization,—philosophy itself, freedom itself— as we see it on TV. I feel awful now.

just saw your 192, which this also answers. Berube and Frank may agree on 95% of all particular value judgments while still having a very different stance re. the validity of the “culture industry” as analytic description.

As for the centrality of popular culture – about which, I say again and only wish there were some way of verifying, I suspect you and Frank would coincide in your particular judgments around 99 percent of the time – to Frank’s argument: I’ve summarized what I take to be his argument at length in 64 and again in 124. That’s how I see popular culture figuring in his argument. But I’ll go back and reread Willis, and also our fateful exchange of five years ago. Quite possibly I missed something.

Which leads me to the other thing: when someone like Frank complains about “vulgarity,” what kind of cultural vulgarity are we talking about?

Well, I’m objecting to that (and the dismissive “gardening” remark) precisely because I’m one of the people who took the Sokal Hoax seriously, who engaged with Sokal’s critique of science studies, who criticized Social Text’s (and Stanley Fish’s) response, etc. I suppose I shouldn’t get annoyed by people who tell me I need to do X and who have no idea I’ve done X aplenty, but I do.

As for George and Frank’s claims about mass culture: I remain mystified by George’s repeated denials of what is on the page in front of him, and his inventive reading whereby Frank turns out merely to be saying that ordinary working people are right to hate American popular culture because it wrongly portrays them as generally stupid and vicious. For one thing, has anyone here actually seen any of this American popular culture lately? I mean, are you kidding me? Sure, sometimes ordinary working people are portrayed this way—usually in hipster culture. But it is far more common for American popular culture to champion The Ordinary People and Their Wise Folky Ways against the suits, the snobs, the city slickers and the sellouts. It’s kind of, you know, a staple of American popular culture. Frank, for his part, is quite clear that it’s “vulgarity” that gets up his nose, and he agrees with McChesney that vulgarity comes from corporations; when he speaks of our culture’s “moral free fall,” he is most certainly not saying that its moral free fall consists of increasingly unflattering portrayals of working people.

Which leads me to the other thing: when someone like Frank complains about “vulgarity,” what kind of cultural vulgarity are we talking about? Personally, I can’t stand prime time television’s endless parade of reality shows and crime dramas; some people object to the relentless reification and commercialization of every aspect of our affective lives; others inveigh against misogyny and/or sexual explicitness in rock and hip-hop; still others recoil in horror from what they believe is the liberal media’s promotion of the “gay agenda.” The point is that there is no United Vulgarity Front in our culture, such that one can say “if you hate this stuff, talk about capitalism! Talk about the forces that do it!” and claim that one is “focusing on the contradiction” rather than accepting conservatives’ arguments about obscenity.

Look, I like Frank’s accounts of the radicalization of the GOP, his responses to conservatives’ redefinition of “elite,” and his slicing-and-dicing of David Brooks. I also think he’s a witty and effective writer, much better at the craft than most academics. But his remarks on popular culture in Kansas are incoherent at best, and they’re unfortunately more central to the argument than most people have realized to date.

But I don’t agree much with John Emerson @188. The idea that mass culture presents “a semi-official way of life” is laughable. Mass culture presents hundreds or perhaps thousands of ways of life; which of them is semi-official exactly? I hope it isn’t the Sopranos.

Assuming for the sake of argument that “for children younger than a certain age TV has authority”, maybe households with children that young shouldn’t have TVs in rooms accessible to the children, or should only have them hooked up to a DVD player with parentally-approved content, or using parental controls and a restricted list of parentally allowed channels/shows.

If you want someone other than you (or your spouse/co-parent/etc.) to be the gatekeeper between the world of adult ideas (which includes TV and the Internet) and your child, you are going to be disappointed. Who else would you trust with that role anyway? Your standards for what you want your child exposed to are different from other parents’ standards and society can’t enforce all of them at once.

It sounds to me like you want the effects of policing your children’s access to media, without actually doing the policing; someone else should do that for you, never mind the effect on adults who want to communicate to other adults something you judge unsuitable for your children.

That is a free speech issue whether you like it or not—trying to reduce either TV or the internet to the lowest common denominator of child-safe-ness would amount to destroying them as media of idea exchange among adults, and at least in the U.S., the government is banned from engaging in any such project (and nobody else has the authority over the whole medium—even owning 90%, creepy as it would be, would be insufficient as the producers of content banned by the majority would take refuge in the other 10%).

You have the right and authority to take (and keep) your children away from that conversation (at least until they grow up). But you don’t have the right or the authority to stop the conversation.

P.S. If you don’t want television dominated by advertisers, do you donate to the Center for Public Broadcasting or something similar? Do you support political candidates who want to fund it or increase its funding?

It isn’t just about you, Tom.

Usually people who hate mass culture hate it because of the effects it has on others, above all their own children and their children’s friends and acquaintances. Mass culture presents what is effectively a semi-official way of life; for children younger than a certain age TV has authority. To that point, the most important one, the “consenting adults” argument doesn’t work, the “marketplace of ideas” argument doesn’t work, and the “turn it off” argument doesn’t work very well.

The stuff I can’t stand overlaps but is not identical with what the Christian Right can’t stand. But the idea that this important area of public space should be entirely dominated by advertisers infuriates me, and to me it isn’t a free speech issue.