Before I even begin, I must say that a couple of the names I will use here might be mis-spelled. I spelled them how I heard them off the radio. I apologize in advance for this.

Now on to my points.

This last week, MTV went dark for 17 hours after showing a movie about the death of Matthew Sheppard, a gay University of Wyoming student, who was tied to a post in a field outside Laramie and pistol-whipped. He later died in a hospital in Fort Collins. The men responsible for this crime are serving life sentences in the state prison in Rawlins.

MTV used the seventeen hours of darkness to show the names of people they say were the victims of hate crimes. The entire thing was a promo in support for hate crimes legislation. There are a few points that can be made the fiasco of a network that shows performers such as the incindiary Eminem doing a promo on the need for hate crime legislation.

MTV played to minority sensibilities in their promo, specifically the black and gay communities. They call the victims the victims of hate crimes, and they advocate stricter penalties for these crimes. However, where are the people standing up for the families of Jesse Dirkhising or Jeffery Curley? These were two white boys who were at least murdered by blacks, and there may have been more. In one of these cases, the victim was sodomized after being killed. Where was MTV then? Where is the outrage over these crimes?

Why is it that a black person can murder a white person and, well, that's just black culture, yet a white peson killing a black person spurs calls for additional legislation. Why aren't these crimes thought of in the smae manner?

Even though the issue can't get much worse, here you had a TV network that is a whore of the people who distribute hate speech in music videos, and yet here they want to get in on the idea of hate crimes legislation. Why? Becuase it is fashionable to be for hate crimes legislation. It makes them look sensitive and compassionate. It's also politically correct. If MTV is truly serious about cleaning up hate speech, they will pull videos that would qualify as hate speech, and they will lead the vanguard toward cleaning up videos in general.

They know however, that teenagers now are as they were when I was a kid...they are grounded in rebellion, and if MTV were to clean their image, they would lose the huge majority of their viewers.

So, what should MTV have done in this case? It is admirable to encourage an awareness of hate crimes and hate speech, but again, be realistic about what hate crimes and hate speech are. Air all the commercials you want, but stay away from these self-serving, pretentious promotions. They make you look really stupid, especially when the promos are only a short reprieve from the Eminem-riddled regular programming.

In the next editorial, I will discuss the fallacies of hate crimes legislation in general.

Artemis

(comments welcome - please email me at [email protected] and I will post your comments here as well.)