A minor point, perhaps, but it curdled the milk a bit more for me when she asserted that Ann Coulter is the right's Michael Moore. I don't think the knock on Moore is that he is a strident polemicist: It's that he is a liar. If Ann is guilty of objective mendacity in print, I should very much like to see it pointed out. I don't think you will have much luck.
On Bernard Goldberg's book she is on much firmer ground; it was personal to the point of puerility. But Young devotes most of her analysis to this weaker example. To me, this smacks of an overabundance of deference to the left. The reason this grates so is that reason seems to bend over backward to slap left and right with equal vigor, regardless of the merits. Moral equivalence has done much to sap the life from debates in all fields lately, but I wouldn't expect such an acceptance of conventional wisdom in reason.
Ken Watson
Atlanta, GA
There has been a long-running liberal bias in media, and it is explained as follows: From the Depression through the election of 1994, Democrats generally controlled Congress, and the national psyche was dominated by a New Deal-spawned belief that government should assume a role in any and every perceived problem. What followed was that news people began to see themselves as participants in these grand adventures -- and ultimately as believers in what was being done.
We should admit that to be human is to be biased. What will mark the superior news person is whether he can maintain skepticism of government, whether run by liberals or conservatives. At the most basic level, news people are trustees of our First Amendment rights of speech, press, and petition for redress of grievances. They need to be ever vigilant to remind us of our founding fathers' belief that these freedoms pertain especially to freedom from government. And this duty would seem to imply that the best reporters would naturally be biased toward conservatism.
Albert B. Hall
Friday Harbor, WA
Back to the Future
Thank you so much for Michael Valdez Moses' article ("Back to the Future," July); I so rarely have the occasion to read anything worthwhile about the macro-trends in filmmaking.
A minor point from the opening of the article, though: Lucas has actually been rather adamant on the point of there being no third Star Wars trilogy. The series will be complete once episode III (now shooting in Sydney) is finished.
I agree that the story of The Lord of the Rings is essentially anti-modern and parochial, confined to the sensibility of an Englishman, and with a world apparently populated with neither women nor any dark-skinned faces. There is simply no aperture from Middle Earth into the modern world that you and I live in, and for that reason I find it extremely difficult to relate to these films.
The Republic of the new Star Wars trilogy, by contrast, is much like our own glittering, Byzantine world -- and Anakin is much like the teenager of today. I'm not certain what forces can stop our descent into the same kind of political and moral decadence that corroded Rome, and Lucas seems similarly pessimistic. The problem is inner, hidden, more psychological in nature. The basic idea is that when the final crisis comes, when the tyrant finally takes off his mask, no will be able to stop him. In fact, he will be welcomed.
These problems weigh on me all the time. Generally, however, I don't see them addressed in films at all, and certainly not with any style. Lucas' saga has been, for over a quarter century, a refreshing exception to this trend.
Jason Apuzzo
West Haven, CT
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