Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
On 9 Apr 2007 at 13:21:19 -0600, "Rob Smith"
<nobs03(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
So it's a simple question: the industry either
self-regulates, or the
government will self-regulate you on your behalf.
It was pretty much the exact same line of argument that led, in the
1950s, to the Comics Code Authority, a "voluntary" industrywide
agreement to stifle the medium of comic books with a rigid,
repressive code holding it back to the blandest possible content
instead of leaving its artists and writers free to explore the wide
range of human experience as other literary and artistic media could
do. It took decades for the comics medium to escape that prison
which it had built for itself.
IIRC the movie studios did something similar back in the 1920s, and that
lasted even longer. A classic movie like "Freaks" was longtime
politically incorrect. D. W. Griffith's "Intolerance" was also not
considered acceptable.
Ec