In an Oct. 11 NewsBusters post, Media Research Center director of media analysis Tim Graham expresses his dismay with how a writer was pointing out that Stephen Collins, who played the family patriarch in the TV show, “7th Heaven” and has admitted sexually abusing young girls, was tied to a show highly endorsed by the Parents Television Council, founded by Graham’s boss, Brent Bozell. Graham complains that the writer “never acknowledges the difference between the artist and the art, that the actor’s sins don’t make it wrong for a lobbying group for family-friendly TV to laud the show.”
But Graham previously wasn’t so eager to demand that art and artist be separated. In an October 2009 column, Bozell — who, as we now know, was being ghostwritten by Graham for years, so we can assume that these were Graham’s words — took a much harder line on the art of director and “child-molesting director” Roman Polanski:
The Huffington Post, the Internet’s most infamous hangout for deranged celebrities, carried a series of pathetic Polanski defenses. Winning the Artists Are Above The Law Award was an ambitious film critic named Kim Morgan, who grotesquely channeled the Winger vibe: “I’ve always contended that Polanski has depicted women with complication, humanity, ugliness and most important, empathy. Polanski is an artist, an acute observer of life’s darkness and absurdities on the level of Dostoevsky or Nietzsche.”
Yes, that Polanski was so full of empathy as he ignored the little girl repeatedly saying “No” while he molested her.
She then wrote “I write this not to defend statutory rape, I write this to study the visions of a troubled, talented human being, a human being who has gone through real horror himself and a human being who also happens to be one of the greatest filmmakers alive.” But she also said she opposed his arrest. She was defending a rapist – but not statutory rape, see.
So, according to Graham, art must be separated from the artist only when that art is right-wing friendly. Another day, another double standard from the MRC.