Word: cops
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Wall Street Journal op-ed 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 incite 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. ("I know your family's grievin...
...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...
...another genuine dilemma. Whatever the actual merits of Cop Killer, if Time Warner withdraws the album now the company will be perceived as giving in to outside pressure. That is a disastrous precedent for a global conglomerate...
...Time-Warner merger of 1989 was supposed to produce corporate "synergy": the whole was supposed to be more than the sum of the parts. The Cop Killer controversy is an example of negative synergy. People get mad at Cop Killer and start boycotting the movie Batman Returns. A reviewer praises Cop Killer ("Tracy Marrow's poetry takes a switchblade and deftly slices life's jugular," etc.), and TIME is accused of corruption instead of mere foolishness. Senior Time Warner executives find themselves under attack for -- and defending -- products of their company they neither honestly care for nor really understand...