CEOs Flunk Social Responsibility 101.

Look what rapper Eminem has gift-wrapped for Christmas. "Stan," a just-released single, concerns a crazed Eminem fan who mutilates himself with a knife, drinks a fifth of vodka, then drives himself and his pregnant girlfriend off a bridge. Shut up, bitch, I'm trying to talk, says the song the "New York Post," dubbed "Jingle Hell Rock."

Hey Slim, that's my girlfriend screaming in the trunk. But I didn't slit her throat, I just tied her up. See, I ain't like you, 'cuz if she suffocates, she'll suffer more, then she'll die, too.

"Stan" is just Eminem's latest outrage. His violently homophobic lyrics--My words are like a dagger with a jagged edge, That'll stab you in the head, whether you're a fag or lez--also generated headlines last summer.

Eminem dramatizes assault, rape, and homicide and, in the tune "Kill You," sexually assaults and murders his own mother. This isn't some kid mailing out homemade CDs from his basement. Eminem works for Interscope Records, a Seagram company. MTV, a Viacom subsidiary, has promoted him heavily. He leers from the front of BMG Music Service's October catalog and snarls from an enlarged Teen People cover that fills a display window at Manhattan's Time-Life Building. GE'S NBC Television showcased Eminem as musical guest on the season premiere of "Saturday Night Live."

Eminem is not alone. Popular culture routinely oozes barbarism and bad taste. Nurse Betty, a Seagram-Universal Pictures film, depicts comedian Chris Rock scalping actor Aaron Eckhart's character before gunning him down. In a recent Perry Ellis ad, a fashion model slouches on a bathroom floor, wearing an overcoat and a drugged-out gaze. Does the brawny male arm tugging at her belt belong to a potential rapist? You decide.

DSL provider Covad Communications wanted to demonstrate that the Internet is "not always pretty." So it published an ad for an imaginary Web site, www.live-intestinal-surgery.com, complete with a vivid medical photo shot inside an apparently blocked colon.

Calling itself "the best shit on TV," Burly Bear Networks posted outdoor ads in Manhattan featuring a close-up of grizzly bear droppings. "Feces Ursus Arctos," the ad helpfully explains in Latin. This college cable network's board includes Cliff Friedman, managing partner of Constellation Ventures, the Bear Stearns subsidiary that led a $10 million funding round with the participation of Citigroup and CIT.

"I think it's tongue-in-cheek," says Burly Bear CEO Howard Handler of his bear waste ad. "That's a targeted effort...We're not taking that out in Fortune magazine."

The issue here is not freedom, but responsibility. Under the First Amendment, individuals and firms may distribute such rubbish. But should they? Are firms solely responsible to their investors, or do they have a broader duty to elevate society, or at least not drag it down to bowel level? Luckily for shareholders, one man's junk is another's hit album. Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP has sold some 7 million copies and broke the record for highest one-week sales by a soloist.

But social critics point past the bottom line. Former National Endowment of Humanities Chairman Lynne Cheney says she opposes censorship. However, the wife of GOP veep nominee Dick Cheney asked the Senate Commerce Committee if it's in the best interest of Seagram's shareholders "to pursue a course that may well lead to federal regulation?" She added that "the entertainment industry is causing such outrage that regulation is being seriously proposed."

New Criterion Managing Editor Roger Kimball went further in a recent Wall Street journal column. He wrote, "judicious government censorship is not the enemy of freedom but its guarantor."

Entertainment executives often shrug off concerns about an ever-raspier popular culture. "I'm not embarrassed about anything on television with the exception of Dr. Laura [Schlesinger]," NBC Entertainment President Garth Ancier recently said, invoking the controversial talk-show host who has expressed religious reservations about homosexuality. Members of the Hollywood Radio & Television Society greeted Ancier's remarks with enthusiastic applause.

No one is calling for a return to Gidget and the Monkees. Naturally, the entertainment media should address mature themes. However, when Seagrams toasts the Yuletide by drowning a pregnant teenager in a car trunk, Americans should expect better. And if they won't deliver, politicians might force them to.

New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, and a Hoover Institution media fellow.