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We're in this entertainment business really to give the audience what they want.

We have to be vulnerable as actors, but we have to protect ourselves.

So we gravitated to shows and issues and causes that made people care.

It's the tabloids, with their intense commercial need to get scoops to bring in readers, that run a regime of fear, where reporters are bullied, shouted at. That's where things go wrong.

I think the media is a fear-mongering operation. They love to rile their viewership up or to scare them.

The stated mission at the time was simply to use the influence of the entertainment industry to do an accurate portrayal of drug and alcohol abuse. We all admit that we're not trying to censor anybody.

Why do we have to have violence, torture, brutality in crime dramas every time we turn on television? Any new crime drama is going to have, sooner or later, a lot of torture and nasty things that make people flinch. Lots of young people I know shrink and flinch from that kind of thing on television, so I think showing it is a mistake.

The American media wants to pump you full of fear.

For the broadcast business to be successful, viewers need to be not merely interested in our political melodramas, they have to be in an absolute state about them - emotionally invested in the outcome and frightened not to watch what happens next.

Hollywood is run by men who are big on vulnerability.