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  3. How did the company come to produce a record glorifying the murder of police, which is entitled Cop Killer by the rapper Ice-T o

How did the company come to produce a record glorifying the murder of police, which is entitled Cop Killer by the rapper Ice-T o

admin2009-04-26  81
问题     How did the company come to produce a record glorifying the murder of police, which is entitled Cop Killer by the rapper Ice-T on the album Boby Count? The album is released by Warner Bros. Records, part of the Time Warner media and entertainment conglomerate.
    In a Wall Street Journal oped piece laying out the company’s position, Time Warner co CEO Gerald Levin makes two defenses. First, Ice-T’s Cop Killer is misunderstood. "It doesn’t induce or glorify violence...It’s his fictionalized attempt to get inside a character’s head...Cop Killer is no more a call for gunning down the police than Frankie and Johnny is a summons for jilted lovers to shoot one another.’ Instead of "finding ways to silence the messenger", we should be "heeding the anguished cry contained in his message".
    This defense is self-contradictory. Frankie and Johnny does not pretend to have a political "message" that must be "heeded". If Cop Killer has a message, it is that the murder of policemen is a justified response to police brutality. And not in self-defense, but in premeditated acts of revenge against random cops. Killing policemen is a good thing—that is the plain meaning of the song, and no "larger understanding" of black culture, the rage of the streets or anything else can explain it away. As in much of today’s popular music, the line between performer and performance is purposely blurred. These are political sermonettes clearly intended to support the sentiments being expressed. Tracy Marrow (Ice-T) himself has said, "I scared the police, and they need to be scared". That seems clear.
    The company’s second defense of Cop Killer is the classic one of free expression: "We stand for creative freedom. We believe that the worth of what an artist or journalist has to say does not depend on preapproval from a government official or a corporate censor".
    Of course Ice-T has the right to say whatever he wants. But that doesn’t require any company to provide him an Outlet. And it doesn’t relieve a company of responsibility for the messages it chooses to promote. Judgment is not "censorship". Many an "anguished cry" goes unrecorded. This one was recorded, and promoted, because a successful artist under contract wanted to record it. Nothing wrong with making money, but a company cannot take the money and run from the responsibility.
    The founder of Time, Henry Luce, would have scorned the notion that his company provided a value-free forum for the exchange of ideas. In Luce’s system, editors were supposed to make value judgments and promote the truth as they saw it.
选项 A、praising acts of violence against police.
B、seeking to earn enormous sums of money.
C、working under contract with a company.
D、exercising revenge against random cops.
答案A
解析
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