Arnold Schwarzenegger's gubernatorial campaign raises a series of fascinating questions, the most perplexing of all being why an international star of his stature would ever want to run in the first place

You can put your TV in the garage, avoid movies altogether, and use earplugs to spare your hearing from the sounds of hip-hop or heavy metal, but these forms of entertainment will still change your life through their influence on everyone else in society. Though you may struggle to protect your own kids from music that encourages violence or drugs or irresponsible sex, you can't possibly protect them from all the other kids in your community who have received full exposure.

We spend too much time fretting over the way the industry produces programming, and too little worrying about the way the public consumes it

This is what many people in the movie industry don't get: when you express hostility to conservatives, many Americans feel that you're expressing hostility to them.

Asking Hollywood to begin to show some restraint and balance in its antireligious fury is not the same as suggesting that the industry must transform itself into an agency for advancing the Word of God.

Unfortunately our children today seem to spend less and less time with their overworked parents, and so they draw more information about the world from the images on movie and TV screens. The true power of the media is the ability to redefine reality, to alter our expectations about what constitutes normal life. TV and the movies have abused that power by advancing the notion that wholesome, ordinary happiness is impossible.

Poor people in America today (people who are officially in poverty) have a higher standard of living - in terms of medical standards, in terms of going to college, in terms of the way people live - than middle class people did thirty years ago.