Gwen IIfle looked plaintively around the table. The Sunday following the Imus debacle, she was asking if anyone among the assembled media elite on “Meet The Press with Tim Russert” had objected to or even noticed the years of off-color jokes and abusive language deployed on The Don Imus Show. No one spoke. Imus had once hurtfully referred to Ifle as “the cleaning lady.” The silence around the table was deafening. David Brooks of The New York Times admitted he was interviewed on numerous occasions, blissfully unaware of the show’s content. Media guests had for years flowed on and off of Imus’s show, without so much as a whimper of complaint. Only evangelicals and conservatives had complained about such things in the culture at large. But they had once been described as “easily manipulated.” Guilty quiet filled the room.

 It is time to ask why liberalism and the media culture have become so blind. There are deep cultural reasons why this is so. One of the most obvious is that ratings reign supreme in media country. Being able to capture and hold an audience is king. In radio, AQH is king and queen, average quarter hour audience dictates billing rates. On television, why would Maury Povitch, Jerry Springer and even the morally smug Dr. Phil even be on the air, if ratings were not the only issue. Have you noticed the moral distance between Jerry and Dr. Phil has been shrinking? In a pinch, the boundary breakers can always call in the ACLU to fend off the critics. But ratings alone cannot explain the Imus phenomenon.

 Then there is the pervasive hip-hop and rap culture that has recently penetrated white suburbia. The B’s and H’s culture has made itself immune from criticism until now for a couple of reasons. One, because it emanates from a victim group which liberals have told as “cannot be racist” because of its victim status, (poor, ghetto and black). This culture, with its Jackson-Sharpton defenders has been unassailable until now, Bill Cosby notwithstanding. Furthermore, politically savvy liberals are not about to upset one of their main constituencies by calling them to task. In their minds, this would be tantamount to re-victimizing the victims. No thank you!

 Not surprisingly, some liberals are complaining that Imus was unfairly singled out. The producer of The Don Imus Show, now unemployed, appeared on The Sean Hannity Show this week defending his show by explaining that everybody was doing it, but only he got caught! Too bad he couldn’t have hired Bill Clinton to engage in a semantic exercise over the meaning of words. “It depends on what you mean by B’s and H’s!” It is true that Imus comments were “the perfect storm” in that they were directed at high-achieving, non-celebrity/politicians, which made them seem unusually cruel. The truth is that “everybody’s doing it” stops being effective argument once a person turns seventeen. No wonder liberals are so often characterized as children.

 One of the most interesting defenses of Imus-type language comes from the post-modern mindset adopted by many liberals today. “It doesn’t mean anything,” they tell us. This “sticks and stones” defense is ludicrous as well, but you would be surprised how often I hear it used to defend casual sex, rock concert raunch and debasing movies. If you want to see post-modernism in full bloom, go see “Blades of Glory,” a movie which trashes just about everything of value in life, nobility, innocence, restraint and consideration for others. But when I point these things out to others, I am told, “you don’t understand it” and “it doesn’t mean anything.” By the way, how can it be both? Only in a post-modern world. Liberals have told us for decades that comments like Don Imus’s “don’t mean anything” only to discover that they do. Imus’s job loss is proof. Sticks and stones indeed.

 This past week, Jack Valenti, author of the current movie ratings system and former President of the Motion Picture Association of America, passed away. Valenti, a long-time Democrat, is symbolic of Hollywood’s and liberalism’s refusal to restrain itself from what it legally could say and depict. To many liberals self-restraint and censorship are identical. Valenti valiantly used the “censorship” bogeyman for decades to stave off Hollywood’s critics. In the wake of the Imus flap, it looks like content decisions will be controlled for media elites, if only by advertisers. The truth about liberalism is plain to most Americans who are not self-deceived. In so many areas, liberalism has lost its moral compass and is setting a bad example. Civilization is an exercise in self-restraint. Unfortunately, this truth is lost on most Imus defenders and liberals.

John Pendleton