Culture Briefs

MTV loses

“MTV’s ’Choose or Lose’ threatens to ’mobilize more than 20 million young adults aged 18 to 30 to vote in the 2004 election.’ Ostensibly, this is a nonpartisan effort, but a glance at the groups partnering with MTV to ’educate’ the youth vote suggests otherwise. The Hip-Hop Team Vote, the National Council of La Raza, the Black Youth Vote, the NAACP, and Harvard University’s Institute of Politics are among the chief partners listed. …

“[I]f the film crews were able to find a single college student with a positive view of Republicans, he was left on the cutting room floor. …

“That [Democratic candidate Sen. John] Kerry came off as a meandering dud in this lovefest shows just how much work he’s going to have to do if he wants to win over the votes of the adult voters who make up the electorate. Kerry should ask his new pal Howie Dean how reliable the MTV generation is.”

—Shawn Macomber, writing on “Choose to Lose,” April 2 in the American Spectator Online at www.spectator.org

Briefly bored

“Spend any time with a teenager and this ripe, Olympian judgment — on a TV show, a friend, a plan for the evening, life itself — is sure to resound: ’Bor-ing!’ …

“To the young, having a good time often seems like a pre-ordained birthright — ’this notion that they deserve to be entertained, in school or anywhere,’ as [choreographer] Brenda Way puts it. … Way sees ’moral implications’ in the passivity and assumed superiority of bored audiences. ’They expect art to come all the way out to their seats without them making any kind of effort themselves.’ …

“A culture frantic to entertain, stimulate, divert and inform us is in no danger of drowning out boredom. If anything, it may make that placid sense of turning off and turning away, buoyantly detached and rising to the opportunity, more valuable than ever.”

—Steve Winn, writing on “We try our best to avoid it, but boredom has its benefits,” April 2 in the San Francisco Chronicle

Air apparent

“While it is not possible to measure the audience for a radio network that has just begun operations … it is possible to make some estimates about the size of that audience from information about the stations which carry Air America programming. …

“[T]he network’s programming is on the air in five of the 285 radio markets in the United States. It is also available on the Internet and on XM radio. …

“[I]t is unlikely that the entire nationwide listenership of Air America exceeds the number of people watching the local TV news on any given evening in a single large — or perhaps even medium-sized — television market. And that casts a new light on [host Al] Franken’s stated ambition to use his radio program to defeat President Bush in November.

“’This show is about taking back our country,’ Franken said on the first day of his program, ’The O’Franken Factor.’ ’It’s about relentlessly hammering away at the Bush administration until they crack and crumble this November, because, don’t get me wrong, friends, they are going down.’

“Given the size of the Air America audience … it seems reasonable to say that if the president indeed goes down, it won’t be because of the new liberal talk radio network.”

—Byron York, writing on “Liberal Radio Talks, Nobody Listens,” April 6 in National Review Online at www.nationalreview.com