Conservatives in the United States often disagree over media policy. The conflict reflects a frequently observed division between a cultural, traditionalist conservatism and a pro-property, free-market libertarian strain. Many in the first group see the mass media as a leading force in the moral decay of American society. Bad taste is rampant. Portrayals of sex and violence are seen as possibly the two most ubiquitous features of the mass media. One conservative refrain, going back long before Vice-President Spiro Agnew characterized media executives as “pointy-headed liberals” and journalists as “nattering nabobs of negativism,” sees the national media as deeply elitist and unjustifiably liberal.

From this traditionalist conservative perspective, the media needs reform. Somehow society – consumers or corporate executives or government – needs to restrict bad content. Of course, the word “censorship” is hardly popular, but at least such content should not receive government support – think of Senator Jesse Helms leading the charge to withdraw support from the National Endowment for the Arts for its support of vulgar performance art and from museums that exhibit obscene or sacrilegious art or the desire to gut the “liberal” Public Broadcasting Corporation. Moreover, objectionable content should be labeled. Even better, it should be removed, at least from all spaces easily accessible to children, a strategy that has received hesitant support from the Supreme Court, although the Court still maintains the principle that any such effort is unconstitutional if it operates to “reduce the adult population … to reading [or hearing or seeing] only what is fit for children,” and the Court has resisted mandated cleanups of the Internet.