[Mb-civic] Morality

[Michael Butler]

http://www.latimes.com/la-et-rutten13nov13,0,1018275.story

REGARDING MEDIA TIM RUTTEN

Sudden focus on 'moral values'
 TIM RUTTEN

 November 13, 2004

 In America's unending argument with itself, the phrase "moral values" has
become the rhetorical equivalent of the groundhog.

 Its regular appearances may be an ambiguous harbinger of things to come,
but crowds nonetheless gather ‹ some out of simple credulity, some out of
cockeyed enthusiasm and some, more cynical or self-interested, to profit
from the other two.

 Last week's reelection of President Bush was widely ‹ and, perhaps, too
quickly ‹ attributed to an upsurge in participation by voters motivated by
concern for "moral values." This, in turn, has set off a near panic among
some media executives, who, like other people, understandably fear what they
do not understand ‹ like morality.

 Much that is foolish and some things that are dangerous are being unleashed
as a consequence of that fear.

 It probably is unsurprising, therefore, that the first spasm of reaction
occurred this week among a group of local television stations affiliated
with ABC. The network chose to mark Veterans Day by broadcasting the film
"Saving Private Ryan," Steven Spielberg's classic story of the Normandy
landing and its aftermath. The film is a genuine and deeply patriotic work
of art, one worthy to stand in that distinguished line of realistic
evocations of men at war that includes Stephen Crane's "Red Badge of
Courage," and runs through Frederic Manning's "The Middle Parts of Fortune,"
Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front" and Norman Mailer's
"The Naked and the Dead."

 All that notwithstanding, more than 20 local stations owned by the Citadel,
Sinclair and Cox companies declined to air the film because they believed
federal regulators might find it "indecent."

 Indecent?

 Have the people who have turned local television into a post-wasteland
sinkhole, alternately offensive and banal, who have tirelessly evaded their
responsibility to provide even minimally responsible local news coverage,
suddenly discovered their souls?

 Not exactly.

 What they have discovered is a deep aversion to paying the fines the FCC
theoretically might impose ‹ though ABC offered to cover any of those, which
shows how remote the possibility was ‹ and a deep irrational anxiety over
what they suspect this election may mean. As Ray Cole, president of Citadel
Broadcasting, which has ABC affiliates in Des Moines and Sioux City, Iowa,
and Lincoln, Neb., told the Washington Post, "We're just coming off an
election where moral values were cited by people voting one way or another."

Knee-jerk conclusions

What people actually meant by that citation is only now coming into some
sort of realistic focus. This week, for example, the nonpartisan Pew
Research Center for the People and the Press released the findings of its
comprehensive quadrennial post-election poll. According to the survey's
director, Andrew Kohut, the significance to be teased from the phrase "moral
values" depended entirely on how the question was asked.

 Pew found that 27% of voters asked to rank a list of seven items, including
moral values, made that their most important issue. By contrast, voters who
were asked an open-ended question about how they ranked the issues cited the
war in Iraq as their top concern. "Notably," according to Pew, "just 9% [of
the voters asked the open-ended question] used the terms 'moral values'
'morals' or 'values.' Specific social issues ‹ including abortion, gay
marriage and stem cell research ‹ were volunteered by 3%."

 Moral values, Kohut said Friday, turns out to be an elastic, "catchall
phrase, and when you compare our findings to what people say they really
believe about these specific issues, it's pretty clear that there has been
no change in what the electorate is like ‹ and that includes the electorate
that returned George Bush to office. Attitudes on abortion, gay marriage and
stem cell research, to cite just three examples, actually are remarkably
stable."

 So what, beyond panic-as-usual among media commentators and executives ‹
accounts for this sudden turbulence? In part, there's the media's chronic
inability to distinguish between morality and moralizing. In part, it's that
some concepts with a religious origin seem to penetrate our collective
psyche to the point they trigger nearly autonomic emotional reflexes. One of
these is Manichaeism, the 3rd century Persian prophet Mani's notion that the
world is utterly divided between good and evil and dominated by strife
between the children of light and the children of darkness.

 How else to explain the virtually instantaneous willingness of both liberal
and conservative Americans to accept the red state-blue state division on
the most facile terms imaginable?

 Here we confront the difference between actual religious ideas and popular
attitudes or inclinations rooted in religion. The former are open to
argument and discussion; the latter are, well, pretty much like any other
attitude ‹ sporadically active, but always unexamined.

 Attitudes are energized not by resolve, but by dramatic stimuli ‹ Janet
Jackson's bare breast, Steven Spielberg's realistic re-creation of men in
combat for their country. It's likewise no accident that the 11 state
propositions banning gay marriage that passed on election day came to the
fore after the city of San Francisco mounted what was, for all intents and
purposes, an interlude of internationally televised guerrilla theater with
its thousands of patently illegal gay weddings.

 That event, more than any other, made same-sex marriage a campaign issue.
"It's a bit of life imitating art," Kohut said. In fact, before the
election, his survey ‹ like most other reputable polls ‹ found that 60% of
Americans favor either gay marriage or legally sanctioned civil unions.
Today, that total is unchanged.

 Similarly, attitudes on that other hot button, abortion, have been
remarkably stable since 1973, when the case of Roe vs. Wade was decided.
Slightly more than half of all Americans believe that abortion should be
legal under some circumstances. Just over a quarter think it should be legal
under all circumstances. Just over a fifth believe that abortion never
should be legal, even to save a woman's life.

 That was true the day before last week's election and it was just as true
the day after. It also is true no matter what meaning people choose to
assign to the role of moral values in last week's election.

 So, our passage through this latest rediscovery of moral values is likely
to be less a pilgrim's progress than a series of dramas, many of which ‹
like the flap surrounding "Saving Private Ryan" ‹ charitably can be
described as farce.


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