by David Lowenthal

About the author: David Lowenthal is a professor emeritus of political science at Boston College and the author of No Liberty for License: The Forgotten Logic of the First Amendment.

On July 21, 1999, a distinguished group of citizens released "An Appeal to Hollywood." Among the 56 signers were William Bennett, Jimmy Carter, Mario Cuomo, Richard John Neuhaus, Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, Elie Wiesel, and James Q. Wilson. Concerned about "an increasingly toxic popular culture" and spurred by the [April 1999] high school shootings in Littleton, Colorado, these eminent Americans called on the producers and sponsors of mass entertainment to "take modest steps of self-restraint" to make television, movies, and music less violent and lewd. What they explicitly declined to recommend was government censorship.

Steve Allen's Efforts

The previous fall, the first of the signatories, Steve Allen, had formed an organization called Parents...