Time Warner Abetting Cultural Collapse

Which corporation is doing the most to lower standards and further degrade what’s left of American culture?

When this question came up at a New York dinner party last summer, there was a vote or two for Viacom and Paramount, a lot of talk about Madonna and strong support for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network, with its lineup of moronic sitcoms for the cognitively challenged.

But after some good-natured wrangling, we had a consensus winner: Time Warner. Here’s how to reach this rather obvious conclusion on your own: Whenever a new low is reached in the culture, check for the corporate name behind it. With amazing frequency, it will be Time Warner.

The schlocky Jenny Jones show, the first show on which a guest who was set up to be humiliated later was charged with murdering his humiliator, is a Time Warner product. The most degrading commercial picture book about human sexuality may be Madonna’s $49 porn book, which, I am told, pictorially indicates that she is game to have sex with everything but babies and folding chairs. It was published by Time Warner and (surprise!) chosen as an alternate selection by Time Warner’s once-respectable Book of the Month Club.

In the movies, the all-time low for cynicism and historical lies (Oliver Stone’s “JFK”) and for graphic, wholesale serial killing presented as fun (Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers”) both were produced by Warner. In the category of movie nihilism for children, my vote goes to Warner’s “Batman Returns,” a sadomasochistic film pushed hard to kids through a tie-in with McDonald’s.

But it’s in the music field that Time Warner does most of its damage. Dr. C. Delores Tucker, chairwoman of the National Congress of Black Women, says Time Warner is “one of the greatest perpetrators of this cultural garbage.”

From the rise of 2 Live Crew and Metallica through the national uproar over Ice-T’s copkilling lyrics, down to Snoop Doggy Dog, Nine Inch Nails and Tupac Shakur, the sprawling Time Warner musical empire has been associated one way or another with most of the high-profile, highprofit acts, black and white, that are pumping nihilism into the culture.

Time Warner simply can’t resist cashing in on the relentlessly amoral singers who work tirelessly to tear the culture apart, glorifying brutality, violence and the most hateful attitudes toward women the public culture ever has seen, ranging from rape to torture and murder.

After the Ice-T fiasco, Time Warner pulled in its horns a bit and turned down a few recordings, including one about a killer stalking President Bush. But those feeble PR-oriented efforts were made in regard to where the pressure was coming from: police and public officials. Meanwhile, the company did nothing about the woman-hating, racism and all-around mayhem.

In fact, Time Warner companies have worked to lower the already low standards in the field.

Last week, Time Warner bought another chunk of Interscope, the hottest record company around, and now owns 50 percent. This is the cultural equivalent of owning half of the world’s mustardgas factories.

One Interscope talent, Nine Inch Nails, seems to specialize in meditations on self-loathing, sexual obsession, torture, suicide and dismemberment. Another huge seller, Dr. Dre, is author of the immortal line: “Rat-a-tat and a tat like that/Never hesitate to put a nigga on his back,” which author Nathan McCall says is “plain and simple, … a boastful call for black men to kill each other.”

Time Warner puts out a lot of benign or harmless music, too. But it makes huge profits by bombarding the young with destructive messages. The company and its president-CEO, Gerald Levin, commonly try to wrap themselves in the flag, pointing piously to the First Amendment and artistic freedom.

But as The New Republic pointed out during the Ice-T uproar, “The contents of American culture cannot be hidden behind the freedom of American culture.” There is more to say about the convulsions of the culture than just to point out that singers can sing whatever they wish and companies can sell whatever they wish.

We are living through a cultural collapse, and major corporations are presiding over that collapse and grabbing everything they can on the way down.

Time Inc. was a respectable and socially responsible company only seven or eight years ago. Now, it’s an anything-goes corporation that refuses to look at any of the larger social implications of what it is selling.

Along the way, the company has put its own magazines in an awkward position; they are hardly in a position to report honestly on what Time Warner is doing to the culture. It’s a mess, and it ought to come up in an organized way at every stockholders’ meeting.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Leo Universal Press Syndicate