Witch hunts in perspective

Talking about video games. Item:

To understand video games’ complex status as our current bête noire of media entertainment, it is helpful to examine, briefly, some of the pariahs of the past. Comic books, particularly those rich in murders and fornication, so irked lawmakers in the 1940s and 1950s that McCarthy-like hearings were held and words like “terror,” “horror,” and “crime” were banned from appearing in books’ titles. Not long after, television was called upon to face Congress, with representatives of the American Temperance Society, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Movement, and the National Grand Lodge of the International Order of Good Templars decrying the new medium’s alleged encouragement of violence and drunkenness. The same drama unfurled in the early ’90s with gangsta rap.

Story.