Hollywood Bill Takes Tinseltown to Task

First the gun lobby, now the entertainment industry. Responding to critics who say the media is partly to blame for such incidents as the Colorado school shootings, President Clinton announced on Tuesday a joint $1 million project by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission to study how the entertainment industry markets violence to children. The effort is modeled on the administration’s campaign against the tobacco industry's marketing practices. The difference in this case, which also sets it apart from Clinton’s recent antigun campaign, is that this antiviolence effort focuses on an industry that has given generously to Clinton campaign coffers.

Tough as the battles were against the tobacco and firearms industries, this one may be even more difficult to win. "Anything beyond recommended voluntary measures by the industry could pose constitutional problems," says White House correspondent Karen Tumulty. Whatever may be the mandates of the Second Amendment right to bear arms -- about which the Supreme Court has had relatively little to say over the past 200 years -- the First Amendment right of free speech has been extensively litigated and repeatedly upheld by the Justices as a very high bar to government regulation. Accordingly, the real question for the entertainment study in the end will be political, says Tumulty: "How much jawboning will Clinton be willing to apply against an industry that’s been one of his biggest supporters?" The answer is not evident. "But," notes Tumulty, "in the past Clinton has often been much tougher on his friends than on his enemies."