So imagine our surprise that a year later the headlines are filled with media enterprises cleaning up their acts, or at least being handed a mop by the judge. Police perp walks for the cameras were struck down in court. Jenny Jones was hit with a $25 million judgment. The Supreme Court prevented reality-TV shows from accompanying police into private homes (and, just Tuesday, rejected a related appeal from CNN). TV episodes and entire series have been yanked for violence, while TV wrestling was essentially accused of murdering a man when wrestler Owen Hart died in a stunt accident: "Fatal fall blamed on competing cable shows," read one headline.

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And, in perhaps the ultimate back-breaker for ugly media, Jerry Springer was first restrained (the final episodes this season, such as "I'm Proud to Be a Prostitute," were pulled, creating a lucrative market for a new set of "Too Hot for TV" videos), then bowdlerized altogether, as his show's owner, Barry Diller's Studios USA, declared it would no longer air violent or profane "Springer" episodes. (The studio has made and backed off from such a declaration before.) Reruns, USA said, would be re-edited accordingly; I assume the resulting seconds-long episodes, consisting of the credits and Jerry's final thought, will be sandwiched into gaps between commercials on other shows.

We are, in other words, witnessing an outbreak of taste in the media, and if I fail to put scare quotes around the T-word it is because there are not enough quotation marks on all the keyboards in all the world to convey the sarcasm with which that term should be uttered here. On the side of the legal decisions, the judicial system is declaring "Fran 'paparazzi are slimeballs' Drescher, c'est moi" with regard to privacy vs. press rights. And the media, perhaps under the pressure of such decisions, are taking steps toward self-censorship in the name of appearances.

You can sum up this mind-set in one word: "post-Littleton." In media today, as my colleague James Aley e-mailed me recently, "post-Littleton" is becoming a universal shorthand for pusillanimous inoffensiveness. "Post-Littleton, do we really want to say his advisors 'shot down' the trial balloon? Post-Littleton, should we use a bomb in that graphic?" Pundits are sprinkling the phrase and its variants ("in the wake of Columbine ...") into their work like so much dehydrated Zeitgeist powder, to imply that some immutable, vaguely described change in society has occurred. But given the addlepated window-dressing decisions that have resulted, you have to wonder if "post-Littleton" isn't best translated as "for a couple months or so, until we bomb a new country and everyone forgets about it."

Next page | Bring on the battling broads -- good taste just ain't our national specialty