With Youth Crime Down, Who Is Now to Blame?

Thank goodness for the U.S. Supreme Court. George W. Bush was elected just in time to shake loose aspiring talk-show host Bill Clinton’s Hollywood pals from positions of influence and pluck the U.S. Justice Department from the diamond-studded hip pocket of the entertainment industry. Right?

The Clinton Justice Department must be doing the entertainment industry’s bidding. Right?

How else to account for the department’s announcement recently that the nation’s juvenile crime has taken a dramatic dive in recent years? The arrest rate for murders alone, it reported, has plunged a remarkable 68%, to its lowest level in more than three decades.

Get outta here.

Yes, it’s true. In other words, not since the presidency of Richard M. Nixon has juvenile homicide been as low in the U.S. Not since Neil Armstrong became the first human to tour a bit of the moon. Not since Woodstock I. Not since “Patton” won the Academy Award. Not since “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” topped the ratings in prime time.

According to these statistics, moreover, juvenile rape is also sharply down, along with vandalism, truancy and drug-related crimes.

Optimism instead of hysteria? Kid crime, although still serious, just a piffle compared with what it was?

Why . . . how can this be when we were assured again only this month by the American Medical Assn. and other health-care groups that the entertainment industry was helping twist pliant youth into junior Charlie Mansons and Tony Sopranos?

To their credit, these health-care professionals are not the shadowy Donald Wildmons and Jerry Falwells who necessarily see Hollywood as a moral Dogpatch and hint darkly that all of popular culture is a Godless left-wing conspiracy to control minds and undermine goodness. Indeed, these medical types were also critical of easy access to guns, Charlton Heston notwithstanding, and social factors that also have a role in nourishing extreme aggression.

Yet their most shrill attacks came against entertainment fare, contending, in effect, that video games, television and movies were schools for mayhem that graduated savage killers.

Yes, lock your doors, America, the kids are coming.

Is there a whiff of a cabal in the wintry capital air? Was Atty. Gen. Janet Reno promised a continuing role on NBC’s “Law & Order” when she leaves office in exchange for cooking her department’s juvenile crime figures? A lifetime movie pass and free popcorn? Her own three-picture deal? Tom Hanks’ autograph?

Is she soft-soaping a crisis because her lame-duck boss in the White House wants to be the next Regis Philbin or Ricki Lake?

Or is it much more likely instead that the charges were hugely overblown from the start, and that the entertainment industry--although hardly blameless when it comes to promoting worrisome behavior through content and youth-targeted marketing strategies--was hardly the brain-maiming, murder-fomenting demon it was made out to be? The answer is yes.

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The U.S. has always been less imperiled by bullets in entertainment than by bullets in real life. Yet heat on the industry intensified after recent rashes of school violence, headed by last year’s shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., where a pair of heavily armed teenage marksmen launched a well-planned massacre that ended 15 lives, including their own.

Big catastrophe, bigger noise, thanks largely to hyperventilating TV newscasts that poured on the hyperbole, seeing the Columbine killings not merely as tragic but as defining widespread moral erosion in America’s youth and wholesome family values.

But please. Is it possible that we lose perspective and shape unjustified dire scenarios from such high-profile crimes--reaching skewed conclusions based on the number of victims instead of the much smaller number of perpetrators--and when doing so reach for the handiest scapegoats?

As in, if it’s bad, Hollywood did it, framing popular entertainment as the the Osama bin Laden of U.S. cultural life? Yes again.

For years now, that’s been the droning mantra of some children’s advocacy groups and members of Congress, most notably Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), who came within a few chads of becoming the next vice president.

Yet consider, for example, that juvenile weapons violations--minors gaining illegal access to firearms like the ones fired by those sick young gunslingers at Columbine--have fallen 39% nationwide since 1993.

The entertainment industry does have much to answer for, and acknowledges too reticently its role in molding culture sometimes in ways harmful to society. Still, if the problem of juvenile crime is not nearly as great as alleged, that also applies to the industry’s negative influence.

How will the hand-wringers square these powerful new statistics from the Justice Department with their insistence that youth violence is exploding nationwide and entertainment fare is the hair trigger? Who knows? Be assured, though, that they will try.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted by e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.