…Plato’s adult citizens are exposed to poetry even less than their children. Plato knows how captivating and so how influential poetry can be but he considers its influence catastrophic. […] He accuses it of conflating the authentic and the fake. Its heroes appear genuinely admirable, and so worth emulating, although they are at best flawed and at worst vicious. In addition, characters of that sort are necessary because drama requires conflict — good characters are hardly as engaging as bad ones. Poetry’s subjects are therefore inevitably vulgar and repulsive — sex and violence. Finally, worst of all, by allowing us to enjoy depravity in our imagination, poetry condemns us to a depraved life.

This very same reasoning is at the heart of today’s denunciations of mass media.