The Mighty Quin
by Chris Gacek
April 25, 2008
Now and again a great writer comes along and hits the nail on the head by vividly describing a particular problem or social ill. Well, Quin Hillyer, associate editor for the Washington Examiner and a senior editor of The American Spectator, has written a terrific article illustrating how bad broadcast TV programs have become: the level of indecency, vulgarity, and nastiness on TV just seems to grow more intense daily with no abatement in sight. Combined with a Vesuvius-like eruption of indignation, Hillyer gives a stunning description of one show he saw while waiting to catch a basketball game. Hillyer then launches the equivalent of an anti-p.c. nuclear bomb: a call for “all decent Americans to proudly demand censorship of the public television airwaves.”
His battlecry made me wonder whether “censorship” is even the correct word for taking adolescent trash – like the show he describes – off the air. Isn’t there some minimal qualitative level to which a piece of “art” must attain – or pretend to attain – before a grandiose term like “censorship” can be applied to said program’s eradication ?
Quin, excellent analysis with a terrific bonus rant thrown in. I salute you and hope the game was worth the wait.
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Comments
“Isn’t there some minimal qualitative level to which a piece of “art” must attain – or pretend to attain – before a grandiose term like “censorship” can be applied to said program’s eradication ?”
Even if this is true, who would you trust to make the classification? That is a position of too much power to be entrusted to anyone.
By: daniel rotter | April 25, 2008 at 11:42 pm
“…the level of indecency, vulgarity, and nastiness on TV…”
Is Hillyer talking about Bill O’Reilly (on his TV show, he called Neal Gabler a “rabid dog”), Pat Robertson (on The 700 Club, he called for a nuclear bomb to be placed inside the State Department), Rush Limbaugh (on his long-defunct TV show, he implied that a then-13-year-old Chelsea Clinton looked like a dog), or Chris Matthew’s Hardball (in which conservative radio host Michael Graham said that Hillary Clinton’s voice made him want to beat her with a tire iron. The supposedly “liberally-biased” Matthews did not object to Graham’s words).