By Mary Faulds, AFA Journal staff writer
March 2009 – Last year was full of events that changed the cultural landscape. Ted Baehr, founder of Movieguide, a family guide to movies, believes five major things happened in media and entertainment in 2008 that reflect the state of the culture we now live in. “The media shapes the culture,” he said. “It is extremely important for people to become culture-wise, to become aware of the media’s influence. Ideas have consequences. People’s entertainment and words shape the scripts of behavior of children and adults.”
1. Media Bias
Baehr’s number one event reflects that sentiment. He said President Barack Obama might not have been elected had it not been for the blatant bias in the media.
“It completely confused the country on what the people who were running for election stand for,” said Baehr. “The day Obama got elected, one of the producers of Saturday Night Live said that they took on Gerald Ford back in the 70s and portrayed him as a bumbling fool, although he wasn’t a fool. He graduated near the top of his class at Yale. And he wasn’t bumbling, he was a starting football player at Michigan, but the image stuck. This time around, they decided to pick on Sarah Palin and the image stuck.”
Baehr said the American people fell for the media images that were created instead of who the candidates really were. Baehr said many people weren’t able to determine whom to vote for based on the facts, but made decisions based on caricatures the media invented.
2. Decline in box office sales
According to Media By Numbers, 2008 box office ticket sales dropped over 4%, while revenue remained essentially stagnant. Baehr said this is going to affect Hollywood in a major way.
“They need to reach out more and more to the Christian community if they want to survive,” he said. “I noticed [in 2008], that every week we got some films that had some positive reference to Christ, which is quite significant out there.”
Baehr said during the Golden Age of Hollywood the majority of American people were going to movies. Roughly 60% or more of Americans attended every week. “Now it’s down to 17% or less going to movies every week. More people go to church every week than movies,” Baehr explained.
He said he hopes for more people like the Kendrick brothers of Albany, Georgia, the writers and producers of the movies Fireproof and Facing the Giants. Baehr believes that it is people with faith and values who tell the winsome stories that capture the imagination of their audience.
3. Success of clean movies, especially animated films
Every year since 1996, a box office analysis by Movieguide has clearly shown that moviegoers prefer movies with pro-Christian, moral, family-friendly content. These movies usually do best at the box office. This was the case once again in 2008 as family-friendly animated movies such as Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa and Horton Hears a Who! were among the top 10 highest gross earners in the U.S. box office.
4. Hounddog pulled from theaters
Hounddog, an independent film starring child actress Dakota Fanning, was about a young Elvis fan who wanted to get tickets to a concert. Most disturbingly, the movie depicted the rape of Fanning’s character. Movieguide and Concerned Women for America banded together to protest the movie.
Baehr said this time it was successful. “For many years, Hollywood movies, and especially the independent films, when there’s been a backlash against them, it has created interest in the film. The good news about Hounddog is that, for us, it didn’t produce the backlash.” Baehr said people avoided the movie at theaters where it was playing, and the distributor essentially dumped the film.
5. Move toward the Internet
In the mid-’50s, the movie industry was dismissive about a new media: television. Samuel Goldwyn, founder of MGM Studios, and others said that television would never catch on. By the ’70s, television was entertaining many multiples of millions more people than the movie industry was attracting. Baehr said television has now fractured into little groups, so they are losing their audience, but the Internet has found a way to cater to small, niche audiences as well as capture huge audiences.
Baehr believes that it is the march of the Internet that caused Disney to drop the third film installment of The Chronicles of Narnia. “None of the Disney films have made that much money [in 2008],” he explained. “In fact, no films except for The Dark Knight have done very well.” He said the movie industry must reposition itself in order to survive. 
