Last week’s TIME Magazine’s TIME for Kids has put forth an entire article about the one thing that they deem to be ‘too much’ for children to have to see in the entertainment industry (Movies, tv, etc). It’s not gratuitous sexual scenes, not blatently violent acts, no, not even racism. It’s SMOKING. It’s obviously a high occurrence, given the statistics that smoking by one of any main characters in films is currently about 77% where back in 1970 it was about 29%. However, I didn’t see many main characters lighting up on any family movies or movies geared to children/teen audiences, did you? Most of the movies that have characters who are smoking cigarettes feature content which is USUALLY entirely meant for a mature audience, containing mature subject material.
Am I right, or am I right? So what, there’s alot of smoking in Snatch, Save The Last Dance, and Charlie’s Angels and perhaps other newer releases to the theater. But what the heck are kids doing watching movies like that anyway They were all not meant for younger viewers, certainly teenagers, but haven’t teens been smoking a whole damned lot REGARDLESS of Hollywood actors smoking or not? Yes. Since my mom was a teen. So what’s new? I’d also like to point out that of ALL THE THINGS these whiners could be waving their fingers at (like violence, etc.), they picked actors smoking in movies to tbe the most harmful to kids.
Rob Reiner, whiner activist extraordinaire, and maker of flimsy, pussified movies such as ‘The Story of Us’ and ‘Parenthood’, is also the co-founder of Castle Rock Entertainment. According to the TIME For Kids article, he blames smoking in films on “cigarette-addicted actors who can’t leave their butts behind and directors who don’t care about the social implications.” Reiner is hoping to put yet another notch in his activism belt by saying that smoking in films is more harmful to kids than language. He’s putting forth a new policy at Castle Rock: Directors wanting to have smoking characters onscreen need his approval first. Other views on this by his peers agree that it would be more appropriate to just apply R-ratings to movies that depict actors smoking. Reiner also says “If your movie has curse words, you get rated R,” says Reiner. “But that’s a lot less harmful to a kid.”
Says WHO? What’s wrong with the contributors of this magazine and Rob Reiner, to be saying such a thing? I would rather have my kids see a film which contains cigarette smokers than swearwords, sex, and violence, if given the choice.
This brings me to ask, is it the media’s place to tell our kids what to see and what not to see in theaters? Aren’t our parents in society nowadays smart enough to tell their kids that yes, Brad Pitt is a man who smokes, but it is unhealthy and in our family we urge each other not to? Yes, I bring up the media, I do not just mean Hollywood (which mostly strikes a liberal pose). I’m talking about folks like TIME Magazine and cable news networks like CNN. It seems–from my point of view–that they are constantly trying to ‘babysit’–as it were–our country’s children and parents, trying to be the authority on the difference between right and wrong.
Oh. And for those of you who don’t believe there is a liberal slant in the media, There is. And don’t send me shit like this article. It’s stuff like this that just ticks me off. Its summarizing point makes me laugh…”On bedrock issues of economic power, what passes for liberal-conservative debate in news media is usually a series of disputes over how to fine-tune the status quo. In the process, the myth of [the liberal media] serves as a smokescreen for realities of corporate media.”
This is not a myth. And for every person out there that accuses those against the liberal media as being “corporate think-tanks” …let me just ask this: Do you not think that newspapers aren’t corporate? Ha ha. Get with the program. Many, if not most major newspapers are now controlled by large companies/corporations, hundreds of weekly publications already are, and dailies are next in line. But don’t start to hyperventilate…corporations are GOOD for the country’s economy. And they’re not all bad. Ye tend to forget that big companies have to start with a lone dude in his livingroom, who spends his life savings on a good idea.
Same day, different year..
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