MICHAEL MEDVED

The left-leaning thinking that dominates the movie business follows a common liberal instinct to deny the spiritual dimension to every problem, thereby profoundly compounding the difficulties.

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.

Conservatives, despite their increasingly powerful presence on cable TV and talk radio, feel excluded and disregarded by the longstanding preponderance of liberal voices on public television.

Savvy observers occasionally note television's resemblance to the weather: Everybody loves to complain about it, but nobody can do anything to fix it.

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

The truth about Hamas and Islamic Jihad is that they don't prevent Israel from existing or even flourishing, they prevent Palestine from coming into existence.

A quick glance at the American left reveals a movement in the midst of a nervous breakdown, displaying behavior that goes beyond inconsistency into the realm of bipolar moods and multiple personality disorders.

The standard entertainment industry reaction to Hollywood's box office slump reveals the same shallow, materialistic mindset that helped create the problem in the first place.

Ronald Reagan, of course, was a Republican governor of California who went through a painful defeat in the 1976 presidential race before winning four years later.

This same habitual blindness to spiritual, substantive dimensions of every significant challenge continues to handicap Hollywood.

Michael Moore became an industry hero and the most visible symbol of the Hollywood left.

Simultaneously, the movie business now experiments with a colorblind approach to casting.

In this closely divided nation, it satisfies no practical purpose for the entertainment elite to be identified as so intensely political and utterly one-sided.

A more Christian America is good for the Jews.

An important film that must be seen. Saving Lincoln is moving, ingenious, original and impressive.

The distortions and insults about organized religion will continue unabated as long as our popular culture continues its overall campaign against judgment and values. A war against standards leads logically and inevitably to hostility to religion because it is religious faith that provides the ultimate basis for all standards.

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.

Why is it offensive to portray a creep and a murderer as a homosexual, but totally acceptable to present him as a religious Christian?

My objection is not that it's pro-gay but that it appears to be anti-marriage.

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.

Frightening media messages...pervade the news business, which really ought to be called "the bad news business" for its preoccupation with disaster and destruction. In broadcast journalism, killing is almost always covered, while kindness is almost always ignored. The more alarming a news item is, the more attention it receives.

For many celebrities, securing the publics votes can prove even more reassuring than winning an election by members of the Motion Picture Academy.

Hollywood's persistent hostility to religious values is not just peculiar, it is positively pathological.

People.. .love to say that 'Violence never solved anything.' But what solved Hitler? Was It a team of social workers? Was it putting daisies into the gun barrels of Nazi Panzer divisions? Was it a commission that tried to understand what made Hitler sorry? ?No. What solved Hitler was violence.

If we wait for the entertainment industry to change its fundamental values, we may be waiting a long time. But we don't have to wait another day to scale back our own private consumption of television.