Michael Massing has written an impressive piece for Columbia Journalism Review on the topic of sex and violence in the media, and the media's consistently superficial coverage of itself on this issue. Massing focuses most of his wrath on the Times , I suppose, because if that paper can miss the point with a culture staff of 100, it demonstrates the depth of the problem.

Here are a couple of choice excerpts. Re: the Times' coverage:

When Janet Jackson exposes her nipple during a halftime show, or desperate housewife Nicollette Sheridan drops her towel during an NFL promo, the paper will jump on the story ... But public concerns about popular culture run much deeper than such incidents, and point to stories that are not being written. In a poll of 1,001 parents conducted last year by the Kaiser Family Foundation, only 17 percent expressed high levels of concern about the Janet Jackson incident. But 63 percent said they were "very concerned" that children are being exposed to too much inappropriate content in entertainment media, and another 26 percent said they were "somewhat concerned." As these figures show, it's not just conservatives who feel this way. "The vast majority of parents," said the foundation, "believe that sexual and violent content on TV contributes to children's behavior."

(Fox News Channel) hosts like Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson inveigh against "Hollywood" and the "liberal media elite" for inflicting lurid movies and vulgar sitcoms on the upstanding folks of middle America. Needless to say, they almost never mention the part that Rupert Murdoch's own companies play in this. Nor do they acknowledge that much of the proliferating junk they so strenuously condemn is served up by entertainment corporations seeking to maximize their profits according to the principles of the unfettered market -- the same market that these conservatives so noisily champion. This contradiction within conservatism is rarely examined by the Times or other newspapers.