Politics of Media Mayhem

Last month, the Senate passed two amendments to a juvenile crime bill that soberly addressed the possible connection between Hollywood and violent teen behavior. The first measure asked the National Institutes of Health to study the effects of violence in movies, video games and other forms of entertainment, while the second authorized antitrust exemptions for entertainment companies to allow them to meet and draw up conduct codes.

House GOP leaders had promised a straight up-or-down vote on the Senate bill, including its modestly helpful gun control measures, but on Wednesday they instead allowed a whopping 44 amendments, most of them more political grandstanding than crime prevention. It all added up to a grand diversion, a day of chest-beating about media violence that wrongly suggested that Hollywood’s often lax standards were at the very core of what’s ailing America’s children. Relentless media violence does have real-life consequences. But some of the simple-minded proposals heard in the House show how far some in Congress will go to avoid the difficult task of controlling guns.

Fortunately, the most sweeping of the proposals--a certainly unconstitutional amendment by Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) to ban the sale of “prurient, shameful or morbid” entertainment to minors--was defeated in a decisive 282-146 vote Wednesday night after sensible defections by some Republicans, including Reps. James E. Rogan (R-Glendale) and Mark Foley (R-Fla.).

Foley cautioned that Washington “can’t take the job of a parent.” He concluded that Hyde’s definition of obscene entertainment was so sweeping that it would have banned Dante’s “Inferno” for torture, “Hansel and Gretel” for sadism and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” for physical intimacy, even fully clothed.

A bad amendment that did pass, by Rep. Bill McCollum (R-Fla.), would let federal prosecutors, rather than federal judges, decide whether juvenile offenders should be tried as adults. Unlike federal judges, who are required to objectively assess a case, federal prosecutors get career rewards for being tough. That bias might not always lead to decisions that encourage effective and long-term solutions to juvenile crime.

Today, the House will take up another set of ill-considered amendments: measures backed by the National Rifle Assn. that would gut the gun control amendments already passed in the Senate, including exempting small gun shows from conducting background checks of buyers. The good sense that finally carried the day against the Hyde entertainment amendment should be summoned again today to preserve rational gun control.