John Leo writes the popular column On Society for U.S. News and World Report magazine, where he is a contributing editor. Before joining the staff of U.S. News in 1988, he worked for Time magazine, The New York Times, and The Village Voice, among other publications. Leo also writes a syndicated column that appears in many newspapers, including the Grand Rapids Press. He was interviewed on January 21 by Perspectives co-editor Cathy Guiles.

Let's start with the title of your [January Series] lecture: Is America crazy?

I certainly think there's more bizarre things happening than, oh, 15 or 20 years ago. I do think, among other things, it reflects a lack of consensus in the culture. A lot of things that would have been stopped in the old days, like rap records that recommend torturing women and shooting cops, the establishment would have just said ``No, we won't associate ourselves with that.'' And now, anything goes, so I think it has to do with ideas, tolerances, blessings given to bizarre behavior.

Do you think political correctness is the only cause of that craziness?

No, there are many causes. The increase in autonomy is in many ways good. A lot of people were held back, even silenced -- you get more order in a society when you shut people up than if you convince them to be restrained. We're probably going through a phase as well where restraint has to be relearned. There's a different ethic.

Do you think people have become less concerned with political correctness after Sept. 11?

I think it's very likely that they will, but we don't know yet. It seems to be more obvious on identity questions -- that people definitely feel more American and less separate from other Americans.

Are we more or less willing to tolerate dissenting voices, like people who think that this was a result of our failed foreign policy, or people who aren't patriotic?

I don't know -- that's hard to judge too. I think responses to that have been politicized. The left says that the right is sitting on it, and the right says you're allowed to speak out, but you're getting criticized, and you're thinking it's censorship. Free speech has nothing to do with criticism--it has to do with censorship or paying a price for speaking. I don't see that many examples. For the most part, I don't see any reign of terrorists-- I don't think the left is being held back from criticizing.

Do you think there's still a conflict between conservative politics and liberal culture? Like the government tends to be pretty conservative, and the entertainment industry tends to be pretty liberal?

Yeah, I think there's an overlap in which the American public likes both sides of that, but I think the American public has deeply traditional religious values, and the [cultural] elites do not, and the elites stand and do things that the conservatives don't like. It's all very complex- there's all kinds of conservatives, you know, who don't care anything about social issues, libertarian or economic conservatives. It's all very muddled. But I think we can read the polls and see that conservative Americans kind of enjoy the autonomy, the freewheeling, uncensored nature of American life. They don't really want to stop that, either. There's a middle ground, or a confusion of instincts.

Why don't the elites have those religious values?

I think this goes back a couple hundred years -- the Deism of the Founding Fathers who didn't quite believe in God. I think the elites mostly lost it in the eighteenth century and were faking it up until now. Now they don't even bother faking it. Peter Berger, a conservative Christian sociologist, said ``America is a country as religious as India, governed by elites as secular as Sweden.''

In one of your columns in your book [``Incorrect Thoughts''], you wrote about TV networks running ads for hard liquor. Now NBC's decided to do that-- what do you think about that?

I'd prefer they didn't, but it's tough to criticize them and censor the ads.

Before they start running the ads, I think they're making the companies pay for public service announcements.

That's preposterous. It's like holding them [liquor companies] up for extra money or something to pretend that it's not harmful.

It's kind of like a tobacco company telling you not to smoke.

It's like the states getting into lotteries, too-- lotteries are addictive, and a lot of people spend their whole paycheck on gambling, and the state doesn't have any problem with that.

What is the purpose of free speech on a college campus? Why do we need to preserve it?

Well, I think part of it is respect for the individual, but the main part of it is you can't have a genuine debate about values if you're silenced or shut up. There's only some parameters for free speech--libel and shouting ``fire!'' in a crowded theater and all that--but on the whole, I think colleges should offend on the side of freedom. They should never shut people up, they should reason with them, or have debates. If you're at all optimistic about the truth beating out error, then you have to let people keep arguing, and it's not the job of colleges to tell people what to think, or professors to tell them what to think. It's to try to guide and shape behavior from a moral point of view, but if they disagree with you, they disagree with you! You can't enforce it.

I don't know how much you know about Christian colleges or how familiar you are with them, but do you think they're more susceptible to maybe censorship or political correctness?

I don't know -- I really haven't kept up. My guess is not. The Catholic colleges, which I know best, have offended the other way--they've become almost indistinguishable. Georgetown and Boston College are, I would think, much closer to Brown than they are to Calvin. And it's simply because of the pressure in urban areas to broaden, expand. Once you hire any and every professor regardless of religion, which you guys have decided not to do, then you're losing control of the college. Because you don't have religious faculty, then you hire only on merit, then you're a secular college. That's what happened to Harvard and Yale--both started out as divinity schools.

Are subjects like gender studies and area [ethnic] studies valuable for college students?

Well, I think they can be legitimate, but my feeling is they're not. Gender studies, basically, is an invention of radical feminists and radical gays, and when they say ``gender studies,'' what they're trying to argue is that everything about gender and distinctions between gay or straight is socially constructed and arbitrary and foolish, and everybody should do everything with everybody sexually. I think women's studies departments are basically radical political bases. I do not know of any legitimate ones. I think ethnic studies are probably not that bad--you can certainly learn by studying any ethnic group or any nation--but I think that they basically are meant to copy what the women did. They're attempts to form political bases, and that's certainly true of black studies departments. When they set them up in the 60's, it wasn't for ``let's have a leafy discussion about blackness,'' that was politics. I think that helped wreck the liberal arts colleges. You're not supposed to have a political base--you're supposed to study things, not be indoctrinated or politicized in education.

Today you talked about how news coverage can't ever really be objective because it's shaped by the people around you in the newsroom.

I think you can be objective or have objectivity as an ideal. At least my generation of reporters assumed that nobody can be totally objective, you're always making decisions as to how to present and what's the lead, what page is it on, but you can aim at fairness. Transparency's getting to be a pop word--transparency means I have no hidden cards or things up my sleeve. The reporter can be transparent, she can say, ``Here's what I'm trying to do and here it is. If you have a problem with it, so be it, but I didn't try to float it one way or the other.''

How can journalists avoid being affected by newsroom culture and other journalists?

Well, it's hard! It's not so much harder in constructing a story, it's harder in making a career for yourself. I've had this argument with apparently conservative journalists who don't acknowledge how much they trim their stories to avoid criticism. It's hard to explain. [Media critic] David Shaw did a four-part series on abortion coverage ten years ago, on how the press has treated abortion, and he said they ruined it; they just slanted everything. The lead of the story was a well-known female reporter for the Washington Post, she had done a story that wasn't about abortion, but it involved something that the pro-life people were doing, and he said as soon as the article appeared, four women on the staff came over to her and accused her of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. So she was being hammered back into line. And Shaw used that as an example of how it works.

Do you think people trust the media more after Sept. 11?

I'll bet you they went up a little bit. I don't see why it [public opinion] should move. One of the things that drives me nuts is how the press culture insists there's been a major backlash against Arab-Americans. A backlash is when there are riots in the streets, and killings and burnings of homes or internment. That's a reaction. There's nothing like that- the American public have been enormously tolerant of and affectionate towards the Muslims in their midst. It's instinct [of the media] to see the worst in Americans--to see Americans as biased, which is almost the heart of the newsroom culture, this subtle bias everywhere. It's not true! Americans are decent people.

How about the government's actions towards Arab-Americans? I'm thinking about Attorney General John Ashcroft interviewing men of Arab descent.

I don't really understand what's wrong with that. A hundred percent of the terrorists have been Muslims. Ninety-nine percent have been Arabs--two countries, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. It would be irresponsible with our nation at risk of atomic attack and biological attack not to look harder at the cultures that produce these people. It may be abstractly unfair, but you're not picking on an ethnic group. You realize that you have to look at millions of people, and you're not going to look at Icelandic ladies in their nineties as hard as you do at young males from Saudi Arabia and Egypt. That's just normal police work.

Do you think there's been a shift in newsroom culture towards being more patriotic or uncritical of the government's decisions?

Maybe. I think we're probably open to that. No one wants to be on the wrong side of a parade. That's a tough call--before we went into Afghanistan, the press was loaded with, ``You can't win! They beat the Brits, they beat the Russians, we'll never win the war! You fools!''--you know, that was the conventional wisdom. Well, we broke the back of the Taliban in about ten minutes, and everyone was sufficiently surprised. There's been a lot of criticism, much of it legitimate--why didn't we kill [Mullah Mohammed] Omar when we had him in our sights, you know, why are we not using any troops on the ground--there's been a lot of criticism.

It seems like there's been a lot of religious sentiment in the air, just ``God Bless America'' in general.

Oh, absolutely. But that's the kind of national Deism that isn't very religious. The patriotism is real it's just unbelievable, the outburst of patriotism but it's defiant.