TV REVIEW : ‘Popular Culture’ Panel: What’s Missing?

Like a hunter circling around its prey only to somehow let it escape, the panel discussion on “Popular Culture: Rage, Rights and Responsibilities” (at 10 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28) keeps losing a grip on the slippery subject of artistic license and social responsibility.

Introduced by Fred Friendly and moderated with lawyerly skill by Charles R. Ogletree, this continuation of the Columbia University Media and Society Seminars under a new title, “Socratic Seminars,” includes a panel that seems to cover the territory. There’s a noted scholar of violence, Deborah Prothrow-Stith; Texas lawman Mark Clark; Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.). There’s rap musician Michael Franti of Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Def Jam Records President David W. Harleston and film producer David Brown. There’s actor Richard Dreyfuss in one corner, and Americans for Responsible Television founder Terry Rakolta in another.

So what’s missing? For one, a cultural critic (anyone from Robert Hughes to Robert Brustein to Pauline Kael would do) who could bring some perspective to a debate that, as the program’s title suggests, veers more to rage than reason. This critic might have described what distinguishes the realm of art from exploitation; the attempts here hardly rise above the “I-know-it-when-I-see-it” school.

Just as strange is the absence of a film director or a TV writer, considering the time given over to talk of violence on film and TV, and how it may or may not affect and influence young people. (Sex is a non-issue during this hour.) This gap becomes more acute when Franti, Harleston and Virgin Records’ Jeff Ayeroff revealingly discuss pop music and the aesthetic and political choices that recording artists and producers make.

These choices mean something, for as Frank points out, just as the artist can choose a certain voice or vision, the public can choose to boycott the artist. Ogletree, sometimes play-acting the role of some of the artists or critics who should be on the panel, pins down Harleston on his own choice not to produce a hypothetical group called the Aryan Brothers, while agreeing to make another record that suggests killing teachers. Alas, even Harleston can’t explain himself.