Kathryn and Jim are correct about the Jason Aldean song. Both Kathryn and Jim quote extensively from the song’s lyrics. If repeating the lyrics makes the song look bad, the simplest explanation would seem to be that the song is bad.

“There’s something remarkably and alarmingly cynical to responding to poison with more poison — which is what Aldean is doing,” Kathryn wrote. The deranged responses Kathryn has been receiving on Twitter prove her point. Just because most musicians who are politically vocal are on the left, and there’s plenty of other bilge out there, doesn’t mean producing more bilge is a good idea.

I just wanted to add that I think it’s interesting that in a time when political discourse has become increasingly obsessed with the content of news media, it has become decreasingly obsessed with the content of entertainment media. As Kathryn notes in her piece, it used to be a bipartisan concern, even if not a majority one, that song lyrics glorified violence and immorality. Not all of this was productive, and some activists became the butts of jokes and probably deserved it. And when people argue for government intervention to restrict music, that violates the First Amendment and should be opposed. But the idea that it matters what you’re listening to, and that it could affect your thoughts and perceptions, is common sense.

We see that impulse now in the fact-checking-and-disinformation industrial complex in news media. Political discourse has become obsessed with the idea that if there’s wrong, inflammatory, or even poorly presented information anywhere, it’s a threat to democracy everywhere. Never mind that political sloganeering and journalistic propagandizing have been around longer than American democracy has. Private institutions, and maybe the government, need to package every news report in just the right way so that democracy can go on, the disinformation “experts” say.

As that trend has taken hold, it has become completely passé to care about the content of entertainment media. Anyone who questions whether it’s a great idea to make music about hurting people is dismissed as a prude or a religious fundamentalist. Sources such as PluggedIn, a website run by Focus on the Family that reviews movies and TV shows based on Christian values, are mocked and ridiculed.

But what is Politifact other than PluggedIn for news media? It comes from a point of view, just like PluggedIn does (read Charlie’s post from earlier today for the latest example of Politifact’s left-wing bias). It is based on the idea that the quality of media we consume is important to the overall well-being of society. And it reviews media based on a set of criteria and rates them accordingly for the public.

Compare these quotes from each organization’s mission statement. Politifact says, “The reason we publish is to give citizens the information they need to govern themselves in a democracy.” PluggedIn says it is “designed to shine a light on the world of popular entertainment while giving families the essential tools they need to understand, navigate, and impact the culture in which they live.” They see themselves as doing roughly the same job (albeit from different points of view) in the separate spheres of news media and entertainment media. But Politifact is portrayed as a brave defender of democracy, while PluggedIn is portrayed as a backward enabler of prudishness.

The government shouldn’t determine the content of news or entertainment media, but that doesn’t mean Americans shouldn’t care about it. And maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss concerns about entertainment media, which millions more people consume on a daily basis compared to news media.