Govindini Murty of the Libertas film blog has some thoughts on Mark Steyn's recent Chicago Sun-Times piece on Hollywood's stifling PC sensibilities:

This is a point that needs much repeating: if you believe in free speech (and I believe there are fair-minded liberals who do), you don’t have speech codes on university campuses, or Political Correctness codes on movie studio lots. Liberals often complain about the Hays Code and censorship in Golden Age Hollywood, but it seems to me that the censorship that exists in Hollywood today as a result of Political Correctness is more insidious - and ultimately far more dangerous to free artistic expression.

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Steyn makes a great point though about why fewer and fewer people are going to the theatres. It isn’t video games, it isn’t DVDs or the internet or reality programming or video soccer that’s killing off box office revenues today - it’s the content of the movies! We constantly make this point on LIBERTAS, and yet it’s amazing how many people still argue that content has nothing to do with it.

Which would you rather watch? Casablanca, a low/medium budget black & white programmer shot entirely on the backlot of Warner Brothers, with wonderful writing and an inspiring message, or the craptacular zillion-dollar budget uber-PC films that Hollywood has almost entirely churned out this year? (Just scroll through this category's recent archives for loads of examples.)