The tidal wave of filth
This morning’s BBC Radio 5 Live’s talk show was about sex and violence in the media. Inevitably, John Beyer was on the phone asserting a link between the media and violent crime/divorce/teen pregnancies/STDs/”swinging” etc.
To back up his claim he cited the tsunami disaster as a demonstration of how TV “affects” the viewer.
[Pause here for the enormity of Beyer’s argument to sink in]
And now to state the obvious. Quite apart from the questionable morality of exploiting this human tragedy to back up his flimsy position, there is also a big difference between the reportage of a real-life disaster provoking feelings of sadness and empathy, and a fictional depiction of sex or violence provoking societal breakdown.
Beyer is either unaware of this fundamental difference, in which case we must conclude that he is stupid, or he is aware of the difference but made the comparison anyway, in which case he is dishonest. Perhaps, given that he is a self-confessed Christian, we should give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he is not being dishonest.
He isn’t the first Christian to use the worst natural disaster in living memory as a rhetorical device. This guy at UK Christian news described the recent showing of Jerry Springer: The Opera on BBC2 as “the UK church’s equivalent of the recent Asian Tsunami”.
Nice.
