Sex, commercials, rock 'n' roll.

• Position: Role of MTV

Since its inception in 1981, MTV has hardly received a kind or dispassionate word, at least from "respectable," "responsible" adults. The 'round-the-clock, all-music cable network, set up to capture the hard-to-get fourteen-to-thirty-four-year-old consumer market, seems to have offended and alarmed almost everyone in one way or another.

Commercial to its blatantly money-grubbing core, filled with images of sexy women and incipiently violent men, set in a mesmerizing time-space zone of its own into which no hint of social reality or cultural history dare intrude, it is, we are regularly reminded, the most menacing of cultural "beasts" yet to come slouching toward our battered Bethlehem.

In spite of all this disapprobation, the thing keeps growing. No one denies that, having already transformed (and rejuvenated) the music industry, it has even, of late, given a shot in the arm to electoral politics. No less a lofty threesome than President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, and ABC News anchor Peter Jennings made a point of showing up first and being televised at the MTV inagural ball, the hottest ticket in town that week, to press the flesh of the young VJs (video jockeys) and fans who had been so instrumental in getting out the Democratic vote.

But wait a minute.

If MTV is so apolitical, why was it at the center of national politics?

If, for that matter, it's so hopelessly racist, sexist, and commercial, why has it been, more and more regularly, the platform for politically explosive rap and hip-hop anthems from such groups as Public Enemy and Arrested Development?

If it's so unambiguously sexist, why has it produced the texts around which the most heated and vexed discussions--academic and popular--of feminism and sexual representation have taken place recently? (Whatever one thinks of Madonna and her academic supporters, or the many new all-female rap and punk groups yelling about sex and sexism in graphic terms, there is no doubt that MTV has been the site of an intense struggle over feminism and representation in which most women are somehow invested.)

And finally, in the greedy 1980s, when insider trading was the national sport on prime time and Wall Street, why was it MTV that preserved what little there was of the culture of protest in the form of such benefit concerts as Farm-Aid, Live-Aid, and the Sun City anti-apartheid event, and raised millions of dollars and at least some consciousness about the plight of those outside the glittery world of the Rich and Famous? (When I ask students to name one thing they didn't know about before television brought it to their attention, the most common answer is "the plight of the farmers," which they learned about through Farm-Aid. No surprise, really, when you consider how rarely poor working people and their problems appear on TV news or drama.)

No, I'm not suggesting that MTV gets a wholly undeserved rap. MTV is most certainly commercial, often sexist, and a lot of other bad things. Its endless parade of half-clad women and fragmented female body parts; its scary glamorizing of macho males, black and white alike, bragging about planned or past sexual exploits; its driving need to valorize consumerism as the path to ecstasy--all these things are true and creepy.

But MTV, more than most forms, is also committed, for reasons beyond its owners' control, to promoting a lot of values and attitudes that are far from conservative, politically or culturally; that are in...