How much shock is too much?

Shock jocks are cultural celebrities and they’re making a huge profit out of being offensive and inflammatory. That’s always baffled me, and I’ve wondered where the culture that breeds them draws the line on how offensive they can be.

Obviously, the Don Imus remarks about the Rutgers University women’s basketball players crossed that line, and it’s all over the news. I’m not surprised at these things anymore, but still dismayed by the general lack of civility in the public discourse that trickles down from these guys into conversations, humor, politics and certainly the blogosphere. The media focus on that, at least for a few days, every time one of these incidents erupts again.

But besides all the talking heads doing the reporting and analysis, there was this fine moment of eloquence this morning that changed the tenor - and hopefully the attention - to larger issues at work here. Rutgers held a press conference with the women’s basketball team present, with initial remarks about the lack of sensitivity in our culture, and the need to consider the consequences of words and behavior. Then the women’s coach, C. Vivian Stringer, took the podium. She walked up with no notes or paper, and started talking. “Let me bring a human face to all this…” she began.

For quite a while, Stringer unfolded the story of these women as individual achievers and team players, on a team that overcame a bad start and worked its way to the top. They include ‘a valedictorian, future doctor, prodigies, even a girl scout,’ she said. I was writing at the time, so I jotted some notes from her remarks.

“In the translation of this story, you lost what it’s really all about,” Stringer told the media gathered there. These women “are God’s representatives.” Which gets to the essence of the coarsening of the language and the culture. When she said the women players “represent all of us”, she’s right, because nearly every group and profile of people gets targeted by hate speech these days. “Have we lost the sense of our moral fiber?” she asked. I wonder why we didn’t have these public examination of conscience sooner. But, “it’s not where you start, but where you finish that counts” Stringer emphasized.

So maybe it’s naive to hope this may be a turning point for behavior awareness in the culture. But if everyone who expresses outrage over these outrageous remarks takes the personal responsibility to speak charitably and expect that behavior from others, hey….things can change.

And all the people who are given access to the air waves, whether TV or radio, should be held accountable for how they’re using them. This would be a good guideline, for starters.

The call for today’s media to be responsible – to be the protagonist of truth and promoter of the peace that ensues – carries with it a number of challenges. While the various instruments of social communication facilitate the exchange of information, ideas, and mutual understanding among groups, they are also tainted by ambiguity. Alongside the provision of a “great round table” for dialogue, certain tendencies within the media engender a kind of monoculture that dims creative genius, deflates the subtlety of complex thought and undervalues the specificity of cultural practices and the particularity of religious belief. These are distortions that occur when the media industry becomes self-serving or solely profit-driven, losing the sense of accountability to the common good.