Posted on 06/16/2007 9:57:35 PM PDT by Coleus
Sixty-eight percent of Americans say the media have damaged moral values in America, according to a report released Wednesday by the Culture and Media Institute (CMI). The report also concludes that the more a person watches television, the less likely he or she is to believe that the media are influencing the nation's morals. CMI is a division of the Media Research Center, which is also the parent organization of Cybercast News Service.
Michael Medved, syndicated radio talk-show host, delivered the keynote address at a Wednesday conference held in conjunction with the report’s release. "This is one of the most important studies of its kind in years," he said, "because it is one of the first to examine the amount instead of the quality of television Americans are watching." Robert Knight, director of CMI, pointed to television's "seductive effect," which makes a person less likely to believe his or her moral values are being affected.
Other findings in the report include:
Brent Bozell, founder and president of the Media Research Center, said "[Liberalism] is seeping into the culture and it's having its corrosive effect." David Walsh, president of the National Institute on Media and the Family, said he was not surprised by the results of the study. "The real impact that's a little bit more subtle, but very, very pervasive, is the ability of media to shape norms and values. That's why advertisers like their messages in the media, because they know that they can influence us. "I think it's circular," Walsh said about the media's influence. "I think that media is both a mirror of society and an influencer of society. I don't think it's one or the other. I think it's both."
But Walsh said it is important to realize that the correlation between watching a lot of television and being less suspicious of the media do not necessarily go hand in hand. "You can certainly say that those two things go together, but you can't say that one causes the other, and they did imply that [in the study], and so that would be, I think, a weakness in their interpretation of the CMI study," Walsh said. "I think it's an interesting study, to show those connections, but when they make the leap from correlation to cause-effect, they're making a leap that they shouldn't be making," Walsh added. Medved closed his keynote address by stipulating that he was "not trying to suggest that television causes all these problems." But, he added, "it certainly exacerbates them."
I do believe that a large chunk of the Muslim hatred of America is hatred of what they see from our movies and television. They watch something like “Desperate Housewives” and think it’s a documentary, not satire.
When liberals ask “Why do they hate us?” my answer isn’t that they hate America as much as they hate the image of Americans portrayed by our liberal media.
While Christians have been conditioned to turn the other cheek (perhaps too much) to our liberal media, Muslims have no such commandment and no inclination to accept what is seen on tv as anything but an *accurate* reflection of our society and values.
Television, internet, movies, cell phones, etc. etc. the world is getting smaller and there’s very little anyone can do about it. If you think about the extreme impact of cable television in rural America 30 years ago, we’ll get the idea.
During the reign of the Taliban, thousands of bootleg copies of Titanic were smuggled into the country and watched in secret under the possibility of harsh penalties.
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