Post a response to this discussion thread
The reason why they were as supportive of Clinton as they were is that Clinton pandered to the MTV crowd (I was 16 at the time, so I watched MTV a lot more then I do now). Clinton was smart enough to know that the youth vote was very important - a lot of young people are somewhat left- leaning, yet many of them don't bother to vote due to cynicism and the fact they feel ignored by the political process.
Choose or Lose has become kind of cliche nowadays, but it was (and in some ways still is) a solid "get out the vote" effort. I think encouraging people to register to vote and then vote is a good thing - I stop short of any sort of "mandatory voting" thing, but I think voter turnout needs to improve if the U.S. is going to be a true democracy rather then just representing the people who traditionally vote.
As for their latest "anti-discrimination" campaign, it seems like a good way to inform the younger viewers about the very serious problems which hate crimes present. I'm on the fence about hate-crimes legislation - on one sense, crimes motivated by group hatred can really freak out other members of that group (I know I'd be upset if some of the young Latinos in my town started killing white people just because they were white). However, if the definition of a "hate crime" is left too broad, then many crimes where hate was not a motivating factor can be labeled as "hate crimes" and people will be prosecuted for supposedly acting on beliefs they don't even have.
Of course MTV shouldn't be anyone's sole source of information - neither should the Drudge Report, the evening news, CNN, the morning paper, an "alternative" zine, Salon.com, the Tilton report, or anything else which is politically biased. Everyone who reports the news or makes "special reports" is biased - there is no such thing as an absolute "truth".
M_H
Post a response to this discussion thread