Few Defend This Critic or Hollywood

It’s nice hearing from your friends.

Unencumbered, as always, by direct knowledge or memory of past excesses, television and radio talkers this week launched another withering round of critical “What if?” speculation attacking the parents of Littleton, Colo., shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

Speaking of criticism, meanwhile, this is also the week that a pile of mail has come in responding to my Friday column rebutting charges that those severely troubled young killers were driven to violence by the media, specifically TV and movies.

A whopping three writers agreed with me, a mere 47 disagreed.

Here is a sampling:

There, there, Hollywood! Don’t you cry or feel the least bit guilty! Your violent movies and TV programs couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the violence in society. Especially among our youth. Why, they’re not very impressionable! And those politicians and religious leaders who hold the media partly responsible--they’re just stupid! Howard Rosenberg said so!

His column should give solace to Hollywood producers and TV executives, who will wait at least a week or two before carrying on with the same old onslaught on moral values. Besides, if parents ever wised up and started avoiding these programs, Rosenberg might have to get a job where he stands for something constructive or decent, or he might have to try to teach something of value to a high school student.

ED STONICK

Los Angeles

*

Question to Rosenberg: If the cinema and TV don’t motivate and inspire youngsters to violence, then they were not to blame for the popularity of smoking in the earlier years, glorifying the “coolness” of the habit! You are surely showing your ignorance by stating that guns kill. No, they don’t, deranged people do, deranged from a saturation of extreme violence in the cinema, TV and recordings.

CATHLEEN MEYER

Los Angeles

*

Rosenberg’s daily, whining exoneration of the entertainment industry’s culpability in the Colorado student executions brings to mind Supreme Court Justice Holmes warning that the 1st Amendment does not protect someone yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. But this is exactly what is being done in programming that makes assassination and kidnapping seem like feats of daring to otherwise alienated, disaffected viewers. Censorship should be mandated, legalized and enforced with criminal “accessory” penalties for producers and actors.

DAVID T. JOHANNESEN

Pacific Palisades

*

A plea to the actors and actresses of Hollywood: Stretch your minds to see what kind of society you can help shape by passing up the violent blood-spewing stories for those that positively affect the heart. Be creative. Go beyond the four-letter words. Stand up and take responsibility for your influence on young Americans.

A plea to directors and producers: Stop promoting and selling such violence. Move into the realm of love and life, not death and hate.

PATTI TOWNSEND MOORE

Hilliard, Ohio

*

Rosenberg is 100% right. It is especially ironic that the talk-show hosts, some of the most violent mouths on the face of the Earth, blame made-up shows on TV and not the miserable reality of their horribly hateful verbal fire. Personally, I’ll take fake shootings on TV rather than the real scary violence inflicted on us by people who need to protect us, but instead are the source of our fears. And if you absolutely need to blame Hollywood, concentrate on this guy who split open the Red Sea, Charlton Heston.

BATYA DAGAN

Los Angeles

*

How interesting that the April 23 issue also displays eight guns in movie ads, including a large ad directly below Rosenberg’s column showing Arnold Schwarzenegger with his finger on the trigger of a carbine. Note that Schwarzenegger is wearing gloves, dark glasses and a black leather jacket that may also be a trench coat. Would that ad retrieve a few terrifying memories for some kids in Colorado?

The Times and most other newspapers discontinued X-rated movie ads years ago, yet still advertise despicably gruesome and violent movies and TV programs. Is the income from the latter ads so great that you persist in displaying your callous hypocrisy on a daily basis?

BUD KLECKER

Long Beach

*

Get a clue, Mr. Rosenberg. The media glorifies violence, and TV is among the worst offenders, sending it into our homes at will. Television has become a purveyor of trash violence and is as guilty as video games and movies. You need a parent, someone to set limits on your thinking. You make money defending your corrupt industry. There are other names associated with what you do.

GARY WEBER

San Diego

*

If we as liberals admit television has the ability to positively affect cultural tastes and attitudes, music, language and learning, then we must be prepared to accept the conservative argument that it can influence a tendency toward violence. Mr. Rosenberg asks: “Is hate a more powerful influence than love?” Take a look at the ratings,Howard, and you’ll find your answer.

MICHAEL SHEEHY

Culver City

*

It would be stupid and simplistic to label the entertainment industry as the only source of violence in our culture; however, it would not be entirely incorrect to rule them out as partly responsible, as are gun manufacturers and video game manufacturers and the Internet. To propose a vulgar analogy, you can’t make a pipe bomb with only a pipe.

Along with the proliferation and availability of guns and video games and televised violence, we have lost our sense of community, the sense that we are responsible for what happens in our neighborhoods, our schools, our towns. Where were the parents of these two children while they apparently spent weeks or months manufacturing bombs, procuring weapons and maintaining a hateful Web site? Who was minding the children aside from movies, television and video games?

JEFFREY RENN

Glendale

*

It dismays me that the first areas of blame for a tragedy like that at Littleton are films and TV. I was a child in the ‘30s. We saw horror films that scared the daylights out of us, and gangster flicks that were pretty specific in their violence. Very few of us became violent ourselves, because we had parental guidance. We also were taught values in school. I’m not talking of values that are espoused by the likes of Falwell, Robertson, Heston and others of their ilk. We also did not have guns so very easily available. If the two boys who committed this outrage against their peers hadn’t had the guns, the tragedy wouldn’t have happened.

ALBERT LORD

Los Angeles

*

Rosenberg’s continued denials that violence in movies and television are not a corrupting influence upon young minds relegates him to the bone pile category of Idiot Defenders of the Indefensible. It’s as though he hasn’t the slightest idea of who he’s talking about here.

Surely to deny that TV and movies have any influence upon teenagers is sheer idiocy! Surely then, because of his views, he comes across as someone who would in all probability be a card-carrying member of the Flat Earth Society, deny the existence of the Holocaust, and absolutely love Oliver Stone and his “Natural Born Killers.”

God knows, it’s a terrible day when I have to take sides on any issue with yet another idiot, Jerry Falwell.

STEVE SMITH

San Gabriel