Intellectual freedom: Truly dangerous media ignored while meddlesome government fusses about trifles, until ...

Until the truly dangerous stuff becomes required reading, of course.

Media watchdog Brent Bozell thinks the storm of hogwash that social media inspired Tucson mass murderer Jared Loughner is dissipating.

None too soon. Bozell also raises the fact that Loughner was a heavy consumer of violence-themed music, and “troother” films

The wire services added that Loughner liked government-conspiracy documentaries like the 9/11-truther films "Loose Change" and "Zeitgeist," and bizarre cult films like "Donnie Darko," a 2001 movie summarized as "A troubled teenager is plagued by visions of a large bunny rabbit that manipulates him to commit a series of crimes."

Bozell does not advocate banning troothers and nutters; his message is “News media, shape up and do your homework!” For example, “It took 72 hours for Loughner's entertainment appetites to enter the media mainstream,” - sure, because the media mainstream was awash in junk rather than story research, so too busy to notice.

And those are the people who would control other media for everyone’s good?

On that last point, I’d also like to observe that truly dangerous media usually do not rate the attention of government before they emerge in calls to mass murder numbering in the millions.

Das Kapital, Mein Kampf, and Mao’s Red Book suited the purposes of government very well, for example, and thus became required texts.

The human suicide bombs of today are most likely reading material approved by the government where they live.

By contrast, the troother documendacities around 9-11 inspired no violent popular movement. And if a band’s music directly, unambiguously causes homicides, the band could be got on a number of charges (inciting criminal activity comes to mind), with no risk of infringing the free speech of many others.