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| "We've lost some of the reporting on serious issues. News values simply have changed." --Jon Hughes, journalism professor |
"I suppose it's human nature to be interested in the bizarre and the outlandish. Going back to the Roman Circus, we watched the Christians being consumed by the lions.
"Maybe it's nothing new," he continued, "but it's tiresome. I don't want to be reminded daily that people are capable of perpetrating such heinous things."
An abundance of news broadcasts on monstrous crimes further contributes to people's perception of a moral decline, philosopher Julian Wuerth suspects. "The moral shortcomings of people are much more visible to us today. Every little shortcoming makes its way into mainstream news and the Internet.
"Local news is devoted to the most sensational events because the market is responsive to that. In the past, TV stations weren't willing to offer that level of programming. Now TV producers are willing to show it because the viewers are willing to watch it," says the father of three whose family owns no television.
"People will tell you there's a lot more sin around today than there was 50 years ago," Hamner continues. "But I always remember something my grandmother Giannini said when I asked her in the early '50s about the difference between her generation and mine. 'The only difference,' she answered, 'is that people today do on the front porch what we used to do out back.'"
Decades ago, media executives began realizing that people were willing to buy a ticket to be voyeurs at the porch railing. "We have to remember that first and foremost, media is a business," says Jon Hughes, director of UC's new journalism program and director of the A&S writing programs.
"We have more and more media forms, which leaves fewer and fewer readers and viewers concentrated in one place," he explains. "So the competition for those readers and viewers has multiplied many times over in the past few years.
"In order to attract readers and viewers, the content of material has changed, and we've lost some of the reporting on serious issues. News values simply have changed."
Philosopher Chris Cuomo finds that sad. "When mass media assumes the consumer to be dumb, then they create stupidity. It's self-propagating. That's just how it works."
Following last fall's presidential election, the media appeared to be on the side of serious news when it reported how exit polls showed the issue of "moral values" had won the election. But political science professor George Bishop doesn't buy it. "The phrase 'moral values' is an illusion," he says.
"I see the phrase being used as an umbrella term for the traditional Bible-believing Christian view of the world, which may include prayer in school and stands against teaching evolution, doctor-assisted suicide, gay marriage, abortion and pornography. But moral values can mean lots of different things to lots of people. It's all so relative.
"When the political left considers moral values, they think other issues come into play -- taking lives in war, continuing to let people live in poverty, letting people die of AIDS in Africa and difficulties in getting drugs and health insurance in our country.
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| "The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."
-- Hannah Arendt, political theorist, 1906-75 |
"Years ago, religion and politics tended to be separate in our society," says the professor who teaches Religion and Politics. "When John Kennedy was elected president, he went out of his way to say the church would have nothing to do with how he would run the country."
But that separation, he says, began to change shortly after Kennedy. Bishop identifies the Republicans' religious alignment as a slow-developing reaction to the counterculture movement of the '60s, a reaction that gained significant momentum rallying around the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.
"Lots of people found experimentation with sex, drugs, different lifestyles, the liberation of women, all that stuff threatening," Bishop says. "Any movement generates a reaction, and reactions take awhile to develop. You just don't organize resistance overnight."
