Suffer the Children
In our toxic media culture, are there no legal protections?
The most recent attempt to protect children from material in the media that the courts themselves have recognized as harmful—this one a requirement that libraries receiving federal money have Internet filtering software—was knocked out in May by a three-judge federal panel in Philadelphia. Two previous measures with similar intents, the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and the Children's Online Protection Act of 1998, have been struck down by other courts. And the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that "virtual" child pornography is legit. In each case, the First Amendment, considered by many to be the most absolute of them all, "semi-sacred," trumped the well-established need to shield children from vile and violent material. As the late Justice Felix Frankfurter put it, in these inimitable words, we should not "burn the house to roast the pig." But is there no way to keep speech free and better protect our children? And what First Amendment rights do youngsters have in the first place?
To proceed, we must first agree that there is a problem. The American Civil Liberties Union argues that "no direct link between anti-social behavior and exposure to the content of any form of artistic expression has ever been scientifically established." Others claim that the social-science findings run both ways, as they often do. But several major reviews of the more than 1,000 studies available on the subject have concluded that there is no reasonable doubt that the exposure of children to violent and pornographic material, while not the only cause of anti-social behavior, significantly contributes to a range of ills, from aggressive tendencies to committing serious crimes.
Influenced by such data and by growing public concern, a long-standing, bipartisan campaign has sought to discourage the entertainment industry from making movies that glorify drug abuse (flagged by President Ronald Reagan), promoting music lyrics that celebrate violence and sex (Tipper Gore), and providing easy youthful access to much else that is harmful but is found in great abundance in the media and on the Internet (a bipartisan coalition led by Sens. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and...
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