Word: bennette
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...prominence of African-American organizations as critics of gangsta rap is a new element in this year's version of the culture wars. In his new campaign against Time Warner, Bill Bennett is allied with C. DeLores Tucker, head of the National Political Congress of Black Women. After a woman working at radio station WBLS in New York complained last year about the lyrics of one rap song, management established a committee to screen the playlist. For station head Pierre Sutton, who is black, it's simply a matter of "not in my house you don't.'' Says Sutton: "Artists...
Senator Robert Dole's broadside last week was hardly the first occasion on which Time Warner has found itself the target of a crusade against pop culture. Two weeks earlier, William Bennett, the former Secretary of Education, and C. DeLores Tucker, head of the National Political Congress of Black Women, brought their campaign against offensive rock lyrics to the annual Time Warner shareholders' meeting at New York's City Center. At one point in the meeting, Tucker rose from the audience and delivered a 17-minute attack on violent and misogynistic lyrics in songs recorded by Time Warner performers...
...member Time Warner board is generally supportive of Levin and his corporate strategy. But insiders say several of them -- notably Luce, former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills and former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent -- have echoed Bennett's concerns in conversations with Levin. "Some of us have known for many, many years that the freedoms under the First Amendment are not totally unlimited," says Luce. "I think it is perhaps the case that some people associated with the company have belatedly come to realize this...
After the Time Warner shareholders' meeting last month, Tucker and Bennett aired their grievances directly in a testy meeting with company executives, among them Levin and Fuchs. It started badly: when company officials refused Tucker's request that they read aloud the lyrics of Big Man with a Gun, a song by the alternative-rock group Nine Inch Nails (sample: "Maybe I'll put a hole in your head/ You know, just for the f---- of it"), Tucker angrily walked out of the meeting for a time. Bennett's direct-as-a-bullet charges ("Are you folks morally disabled?") were...
...impressed with the lack of candor," said Bennett. "It was extremely pompous. Here were these guys in $4,000 suits making us feel like we were lucky to be getting the time of day." Company officials, on the other hand, assert that while Tucker was reasonable and focused on solutions, Bennett seemed intent on confrontation and publicity. "He came in with no information and no credentials to discuss any of this intelligently," says Fuchs. "I guess he thought he was the self-appointed marshal riding in on a white horse to be the arbiter of morals...