Infotainment cure: switch off TV and read newspaper.

MICHAEL MEDVED

Film Critic, Radio Host

Who's to blame for the predominance of "infotainment" on television, the broadcasts that obliberate the line between news and entertainment, that glorify celebrity and trivialize the consequential? Viewers are, says this critic, because they fail to demand anything better. Speech to the Centre for Constructive Alternatives, Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan, February, 1999.

A recent Gallup poll reveals that Hustler publisher Larry Flynt enjoys a higher personal approval rating (42%), than House Judiciary Committee chairman Henry Hyde (30%). I can't think of a better or more disturbing example of the tremendous power of television news.

Newscasters and correspondents seldom if ever identify Flynt as a hard-core pornographer. Instead, he is politely referred to as a "controversial defender" of the First Amendment and freedom of the press. Even when the White House brazenly misidentified Flynt (one of Clinton's staunchest allies) as a publisher of a "news magazine," it provoked merely titters rather than indignation. Is this because Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings consider Flynt a colleague? Even if Flynt owned a gold-plated press pass and a trunk full of Pulitzer Prizes, I doubt that they would want to be professionally associated with him.

They don't call him by his true name ("Pornographer General," as dubbed by Wes Pruden of the Washington Times) because the line between news and entertainment has been obliterated in our television-obsessed culture. Flynt is …