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Jason Aldean made headlines when his music video to “Try That in a Small Town” was pulled from CMT. In a recent concert he said, “What I am is a proud American," he continued. "I'm proud to be from here. I love our country, I want to see it restored to what it once was before all this bulls--- started happening to us. I love our country, I love my family, and I will do anything to protect that. I can tell you that right now.” To me, it seems like he is vocalizing something a lot of people think, but don’t want to say, which is that they would like to return to a bygone era in the US. The problem is that there was a lot of racism, sexism, and inequality in that bygone era. Do people really want vigilante justice? What is the appeal of this song?
Speaking of differences between rural and urban America, a recent study shows that the most rural counties had a 37% higher rate of firearm deaths than the most urban counties from 2011 to 2020. The authors attributed the trend to a rise in gun suicides, which outnumbered gun homicides in 2021 by more than 5,300 and are more likely to occur in rural counties. Is there a crisis happening in rural America that is at the root of some of this outrage?
True crime is one of the most popular genres of entertainment in the United States. Half of Americans say that they enjoy true-crime content, and one in three say they consume it at least once a week. The most popular true crime content deals with murder, serial-killing, and kidnapping. Nobody really knows why people are fascinated with this genre, but some argue that it is because we try to imagine how we would cope in the same situation, grateful in the knowledge that it has happened to someone else and that what we have learned perhaps provides a valuable lesson. Others think that true crime gives people a better understanding of the criminal justice system, or makes people vigilant and safety-conscious. I want to know if all this true crime content is bad for us spiritually. Do we have a moral obligation to avoid this kind of content?

Do we have a moral obligation to be informed? Recently, there was a dispute about whether ESPN is good or bad for sports. One side argued that ESPN rose in popularity by providing “dumb” content to viewers. As a result, all of the more informed content lost a platform for providing accurate, intelligent information to consumers. But this happens in every entertainment genre. Dumb, brainless content gets the most clicks. This creates a market incentive to create dumbed-down content that appeals to our base instincts. A decade ago, Elder Russell M. Nelson said that education is a religious responsibility. Does this apply to the media we consume? Do we have a religious obligation to consume media that will make us smarter?