Some people are so upset about what they see on TV and hear on the radio that they’ll do anything to prevent you from seeing or hearing it. Rather than shut the set, change the channel, or use tools like the V-chip or filters, these people are using the most primitive, blunt instrument they can—destroying everyone’s right to see and hear what they want.
It’s a new version of Prohibition, in which a small group of people decides how everyone is going to live. And we all know how well that worked out.
“Morality” groups and too many government officials want something that’s unknown in almost any other Western country—to eliminate virtually any depiction of or reference to sexuality on TV and radio, whether programs are free or paid. They present this goal as reasonable, but it represents a radical change in how America is governed. And it represents the triumph of fear over freedom.
The war over broadcast “indecency” is a national power struggle. It’s a struggle over how sexuality will be perceived: as a danger to be feared and regulated, or as an inevitable part of life that challenges us to grow, and demands to be understood and celebrated. Even more than that, the war over broadcast “indecency” is about the nature of pluralism: Is it something to be feared and regulated, or is it a unique and precious part of our American heritage that must be continually protected from both external and internal threats?
This, more than the right to see Janet Jackson’s nipple, is the crucial political issue every freedom-loving American should care about. The War on Sex is the battlefield on which the issue of pluralism will be fought. The War on Sex is a Theater of Power.
The very way the public debate is framed—“the problem of indecency”—is itself part of the issue, as it dramatically limits the solutions that can be generated. We could, instead, be debating the “contrast in values problem,” or the “some people’s discomfort with sex-related programming problem,” or the “intolerance problem.” Even if we didn’t solve such problems, this formulation would be progress—over people frantically trying to solve the wrong “problem,” predicting disaster if we don’t solve it.
In what way are the so-called F word (is there a more juvenile expression?), tampon commercials, and talk shows about threesomes harmful to Americans? Here’s what the Parents Television Council (PTC) claims, without any serious documentation whatsoever:
Thousands upon thousands of clinical studies [really?!] show a direct, causal relationship between the messages children see in the media and their behavior and development …
Time and time again, we see our children being disrespectful. We hear them using language that would never have been used in our growing up years, ever [yes, the world has changed a bit since 1962]. We see a sexual awareness that at the very least is disturbing [which is not the same thing as “unhealthy”]. What will these youngsters be like when they are adults? Won’t they exhibit the same antisocial behavior that is a part of their world today? I’m afraid that is so.1
The typical anti-indecency arguments ultimately come down to:
1. Exposure to sexual themes and words is dangerous for kids.
2. Exposure to sexual themes and words damages adult relationships.
3. The broadcast of sexual themes and words forces adults to have conversations with kids that adults don’t want to have.
4. Sexual themes and words in the media “coarsen” our culture.
5. “Moral” people deserve to have their “morality” validated, and deserve to have others’ “immoral” interests eliminated from the public sphere.
6. Some people are mentally unbalanced, and hearing “bad” words or seeing “bad” body parts might motivate them to commit sex crimes.
And here are the straightforward responses (feel free to use these next time you face this kind of misinformation or prejudice):
1. There’s no data to support this idea; in fact, withholding ordinary sexual information and words from kids is bad for them, retarding their normal intellectual and emotional growth.
True, the kind of sexuality typically portrayed and referenced on TV isn’t the best for kids to see or hear—it’s often stupid, stereotypical, and unrealistic. But that doesn’t mean it’s dangerous.
2. That’s just silly. As a marriage counselor for 31 years, I have observed that most couples suffer from too little conversation about sex, not too much. Watching a condom commercial or actors tongue-kissing may make a couple uncomfortable, but it doesn’t damage them. If they’re so uncomfortable with such things that they have to retreat from each other, the couple’s problems go deeper than whatever is on TV or radio.
3. Yes, that’s right. And that’s good; it’s called “parenting.” TV offers an unending series of teachable moments, of opportunities for adults to talk with kids about sexuality, relationships, decision-making, gender, and values. This is the antidote to whatever is bothering parents about any possible harm from sex on the media. The solution to dumb talk is smart talk, not no talk.
Talking with your kids about references to sexuality on TV and radio isn’t a problem, it’s a solution. If some adults are uncomfortable with this opportunity, that’s no reason to eliminate it for other parents, or to punish non-parents.
4. Our culture has indeed changed in the 70 years since television was invented (and even more so since the invention of radio). During this time, America has also participated in five wars and lived through the invention of the Pill; a huge increase in the number of women in the full-time workforce; a dramatic increase in the age of first marriage; a huge exodus of middle-class people from the core of every big American city; the decriminalization of contraception, abortion, and sex between unmarried people; a huge increase in the daily privacy of school-age children and teenagers; and the geographic dispersion of most families. Oh, and the invention of the Internet and cell phone. If American culture has become coarsened, every one of these changes is responsible along with sexual themes in the media.
5. Actually, “moral” people do not deserve to have their morality validated in the public sphere. That’s what the private sphere is for. Otherwise, the media would simply be a tool of the current ruling party, as it is in China and Russia.
The U.S. Supreme Court has challenged the very idea that enhancing personal “morality” is a valid government function.2 Using government power to restrict the content of broadcast media for this reason, therefore, is clearly both inappropriate and illegal in a secular democracy.
6. Public policy generated by the fear of a handful of crazies is never sensible and isn’t the norm in American life. We don’t limit food distribution because of bulimics, we don’t limit car distribution because of terrible drivers, and we don’t limit the number of bridges because a few people jump off them.
It’s hard to believe the sincerity of would-be censors’ fear of “the crazies.” If their concern were serious, they would have demanded the limitation of private handguns following the 1999 school shootings in Columbine and 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech. They would have eliminated college fraternities because of the periodic injuries or deaths during hazing—but they haven’t. Along with “What about the children?” the “What about the crazies?” argument is intellectually indefensible, and we shouldn’t give it any weight.
As talk show host Dick Cavett said about TV causing violence and other social problems, “There’s so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?”3
* * *
One more point about the alleged harm of sexual imagery on radio and television. For decades, Western Europe has been running the experiment America refuses to. European TV features words, themes, and pictures—including nudity—that are prohibited to American audiences and broadcasters.4
According to the predictions of America’s moral crusaders, Europe should therefore be a cesspool of sexual perversion. But it’s just the opposite—their rates of sexual violence are lower than ours, and their rates of teen pregnancy and teen abortion are dramatically lower than ours. Table 6.1 shows some convincing facts.5
Table 6.1. Teen Birth and Abortion Rates, by Country
Nation |
Teen Birth Rates (per 1,000 women ages 15–19) |
Teen Abortion Rates (per 1,000 women ages 15–19) |
|---|---|---|
United States |
48.7 |
27.5 |
Netherlands |
4.5 |
4.2 |
Germany |
12.5 |
3.6 |
France |
10.0 |
10.2 |
It’s what parents are always telling their six-year-olds: “I know you’re afraid, but that doesn’t mean there’s something real to be afraid of.”
The crusaders who are trying to eliminate sex-related broadcasting have a big problem—they see sex everywhere. Where you might laugh (or not) at a simple joke on Comedy Central about penis size, crusaders feel assaulted. Where you might ignore a tampon or douche commercial, they feel assaulted. Where you might be bored (or intrigued) by a Katie Couric episode about teen hookers, they feel assaulted. That’s a lot of assault. If you’re not obsessed with sex, you might not even put these three experiences together in your mind. You might casually observe “dumb joke + health product + social problem (exaggerated or not).” They perceive “sex + sex + sex.” And for them, it never stops; people obsessed with sex that they resent never have a nice day.
When people are obsessed by sex—not about doing it, but by the subject—they see it everywhere. Like a four-year-old in a candy store or an eight-year-old at a scary movie, they are simply not emotionally equipped to ignore what they see. We should feel sympathy for these people, but they make it difficult, because they deal with their upset in such an aggressive way. You know how some people have a frustrating day at work, come home, and kick their dog? People who are obsessed by sex regularly feel assaulted by yet another on-air example of it (remember, they don’t know how to ignore it), and in response they kick you.
And then they claim it’s for your own good. Nice touch. Do they say that to their dog while kicking it, too?
What if such people saw sex everywhere, but didn’t fear it? It is, after all, possible to see the erotic potential around us—sexual issues in health care, the needs of teens to be better prepared for relationships, the beauty of people talking honestly about difficult sexual feelings, the sensuality of babies, the complexity of adultery, the poetry of everyday eros—and rather than feel repulsed and desperate to escape from it, to feel intrigued, compassionate, bemused, and involved in the human parade, the Divine Comedy.
We could argue that moral crusaders can’t evaluate the “community standard” around sexuality because they don’t see any sex-related issue in context (and seeing things in context is part of the legal requirement for determining the community standard). Consider their outrage about the soldiers’ language in Saving Private Ryan, or about the shriveled, wretched bare breasts of Holocaust prisoners in Schindler’s List; crusaders literally can’t see these as non-erotic because once a theme or word or picture in any way relates to sexuality, it belongs to the enormous, simplistically monolithic category they call “sexy.”
Moral crusaders have also invested magical, demonic powers in certain combinations of syllables. They’ve spent millions of dollars pursuing NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt’s “S word expletive,” Bono’s “F word expletive,” and Comedy Central roasts that “bring unspeakable vulgarity” into U.S. households.6 The legislature and courts of our proud democracy have actually spent thousands of working hours debating whether Bono unexpectedly used “fucking” as an adjective or a sexual reference7—a legal point that would determine whether the network on which he spontaneously said it would be punished by the government.
Seeing sex everywhere, and hating it, explains censors’ desperate grab for power and their desperate demand for action now. But asking these people about a “community standard” regarding sexuality is like asking an anorexic to evaluate a movie for its possible connection to food or eating—which they’d see (and recoil from) in every frame.
When the government or crusaders refer to a “community standard,” should it be the standard of people who see sex everywhere, or of healthier people who have a less obsessive perspective? We must acknowledge that for people who see sex everywhere, cleansing the environment so that they see none is virtually impossible.
This is a common complaint of those who want less eroticism in the public sphere. But that’s the wrong question, a phony question. And once moral crusaders get everyone looking at the wrong question, it doesn’t matter what answers people come up with.
The right question is, “Why must you delete eroticism from everything?”
Sexuality is an enormous part of human life. That’s why, whether on cave walls, pottery, papyrus, or the Internet, it’s been a central theme of art since the beginning of recorded human existence.8
The choices faced by the broadcast media (and of all performing, literary, and fine arts) are to portray sexual themes well, portray them poorly, or omit them. Erotophobes want America to move from portraying sexuality poorly to omitting it. We actually need to move in the opposite direction—from portraying it poorly to portraying it well.
Unfortunately, the sexual material on TV and radio is either stupid (e.g., sitcoms, shock jocks) or extreme (e.g., CSI, Nip/Tuck). Broadcast media typically portray sexual themes, situations, and feelings as less interesting, less rich, and less sophisticated than they could, not to mention less accurately and more stereotyped. That actually is a problem, but anti-sex crusaders don’t see it.
We need more everyday, real stuff in between these poles—an idea which, oddly, many observers consider too radical. The intensity of CSI-type sexual references may be in bad taste, but it’s inevitable. It’s how both Hollywood and audiences act out their frustration with the lack of realistic sexuality in broadcasts. It’s why the second a show announces that it’s pushing the edge on language or nudity—NYPD Blue, The Sopranos, South Park, The Daily Show—people rush to tune in. Imagine—characters talking or behaving like real people—incredible!
Methodically stripping sexuality from the public arena not only distorts all portrayals of life, the process itself is socially devastating. We’ve seen this in Europe’s witch hunts, Victorian England’s obsession with prostitution, and the “honor killings” of women in strict Muslim societies around the globe.
We must stop being defensive about this and say unequivocally, “Yes, eroticism belongs in broadcast media presentations—because it’s part of the lives the media portrays, and the lives of its audience.” Coming to terms with sexuality is part of growing up. This involves a process that may not always be comfortable, but it is essential for emotional, spiritual, family, and community health. The opposite? Think about turn-of-the-twentieth-century American children who were literally handcuffed to their bedposts each night to prevent them from destroying their health through masturbation.9 Think about the sexually tormented J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy obsessively tormenting the rest of us.
Stories about real life, commercials about real situations, jokes about real misunderstandings—the media doesn’t insert sex into these, sex lives in these. Americans need and deserve to see it and hear it, in recognizable, sophisticated, normal-seeming ways.
Morality groups and many elected Congress members want the airwaves sanitized to be “family friendly” or “safe for children.” This assumes that families never observe or discuss sexual themes, and it begs the question of what is safe for children; morality crusaders apparently mean it to be reducing all programming and advertising to themes and words that won’t challenge kids’ alleged innocence.
Broadcaster Bill O’Reilly, for example, believes that five-year-olds can’t understand the concept of a uterus, and that the very word “destroys their innocence.” He also objects to school children hearing the words “penis” and “vulva” in sex education class.10 This would give children way more rights than adults—which, by the way, is exactly what these same groups are trying to do regarding the Internet (see Chapter 8).
Decades ago, the Supreme Court ruled that the government can’t “reduce the adult population … to reading only what is fit for children.”11 Or as Mark Twain put it in his characteristic way, “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.”
The same is true for broadcasting. It’s dangerous for a democracy to restrict adults to what’s (supposedly) safe for kids. It prevents citizens from facing and exploring different ways of addressing adult challenges. It encourages passivity and narrow thinking. But to “decency” crusaders and the politicians who enable them, desexualized adults are less threatening than full adults. Convincing a public that certain syllables or body parts broadcast into our homes are more dangerous than toxic waste across town or overcrowded classrooms down the street creates a constituency that is frightened, angry— and therefore motivated to donate money and time to morality groups and conservative politicians.
The legal and political issue of “indecency” is confusing for two reasons. First, the very idea of a democratic government giving itself the right to determine what adults can see and hear is bizarre. Second, because this bizarre idea contradicts the guarantees of our Bill of Rights, Congress and the courts have had to erect odd ways of defining what is and isn’t permissible.
Speech and broadcasts related to sexuality fall into three legal categories: (1) obscenity, (2) indecency, and (3) non-obscene, non-indecent stuff that some people hate. The three are defined below. If the legal language sounds like subjective nonsense, that’s because it is. But our government takes these criteria seriously. Prosecutors and morality groups depend on these definitions to help them limit what you can hear or see.
Obscene speech is not protected by the First Amendment and cannot be broadcast at any time.
It is illegal to broadcast anything indecent between 6:00 a.m. and midnight.
You can see that when a civic group or elected officials want to restrict your access to certain words or pictures, getting the government or the courts to decide that it’s indecent or obscene is a phenomenally powerful tool. Once something is ruled indecent or obscene, the government then has the right (actually, the obligation) to restrict or ban it.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could decide, for example, that the word “breast” is indecent, in which case, adults wouldn’t be allowed to hear it on the air between 6:00 a.m. and midnight, seven days per week. It could even decide that the word “breast” is obscene, in which case it wouldn’t be allowed on any show at any time. Farfetched? Well, groups like Citizens for Community Values are pushing legislation that redefines certain words and images. And already, we take it for granted that Jay Leno can’t say the words “clitoris” or “fellatio,” much less show examples of either.13
As these definitions show, a bureaucrat, judge, or Congress has wide latitude in determining which words and pictures you do not have the freedom to hear, see, or broadcast. “The problem is, the indecency ‘standard’ is not a standard,” argues Cato adjunct scholar Bob Corn-Revere. “It’s basically a test for what people find distasteful, which is entirely in the eyes and ears of the beholder.”14 Too much of the War on Sex is described as allowing or restricting broadcasters from doing this or that. While this is accurate,your rights to hear and see are equally under attack. This crucial point seems to get lost over and over.
The FCC’s original mandate was to (1) encourage diversity of programming, (2) make sure there was programming specifically designed for children, and (3) assign unique frequencies to radio and television broadcasters from the usable spectrum that was limited by the technology of the day.
The FCC has pretty much given up on its first two mandates. And now that satellites, coaxial cable, and broadband have expanded our viewing choices almost infinitely, the “public airwaves” are an entirely different kind of resource, which virtually eliminates the third rationale for the FCC as currently constituted.
When the FCC started insisting it could and should police broadcast content, it justified its interference because “TV and radio come into the privacy of people’s homes.”15 It was a ridiculous argument, but the courts agreed. The rise of satellite radio, cable TV and pay-per-view TV has demolished that audience-as-passive-victim argument.
But under a series of activist commissioners under George Bush, the FCC accelerated its controversial role of government watchdog of what Americans can see and hear. There are only two precedents for this, both disastrous: the 1873 Comstock Act severely punished anyone mailing anything “lewd” (including contraceptive information) and lasted for 100 years. The Motion Picture Production Code stifled American film production from 1930 to 1968, promising that “No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. … Correct standards of life … shall be presented. Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed.”16
The FCC has blown its original mission—they’ve overseen the unprecedented concentration of media ownership into just a few corporate hands, leading to the near-destruction of local commercial radio, as well as the news departments of most local TV stations. In 2003, they attempted to pass new regulations allowing an even smaller number of companies to own an even larger percentage of communities’ radio, TV, and newspaper outlets. This was such a greedy giveaway that even the Republican-controlled Congress resisted, and the proposal was challenged and ultimately rolled back in 2004.17
As public interest attorney Marjorie Heins notes, the public desperately needs the FCC to take its original responsibility seriously—regulating media structure, not content. It seems “there are a million channels,” she says, “but there’s hardly a true diversity of ideas out there in the mass media.”18
So what is the FCC doing instead? Protecting America’s children from the F word. Reacting to public “concern” with all the finesse of a 400-pound Romanian weightlifter.
In 2005, Kevin Martin, a lawyer for the 2000 Bush/Cheney campaign and later a White House aide to President Bush, was appointed FCC chair. He says that if obviously “inappropriate” material isn’t kept off the air, the very definition of indecency may have to be changed. And he’s keeping up with the times, looking at new media as well; he’s committed to ending the relatively unregulated state of cable and satellite TV.
Audience rights? Broadcaster rights?
“Certainly broadcasters and cable operators have significant First Amendment rights, but these rights are not without boundaries,” Martin said. “They are limited by law. They also should be limited by good taste.”19Whose taste, of course, is the critical question. Our Constitution is cleverly designed to make that question irrelevant by excluding subjectivities like “good taste” or “blasphemy” or “indecency” as criteria for government action. Censoring content according to the vagaries of a bureaucrat’s definition of “good taste” is exactly what keeps the Russian media completely toothless.
The FCC has it exactly backward: it favors deregulation of industry, but regulation of content and consumers. They cite the wisdom of the marketplace when justifying corporate giveaways—and ignore it when censoring content that the same market would allow.
Remember that the FCC is required to refer to “community standards” when making judgments of any kind. If taken seriously, this would help prevent the FCC from becoming a bureaucratic kingdom running amok, or from being used as an agent of government tyranny. In continually ignoring this legal mandate, however, the FCC has used its punitive powers to reward the censorship groups that support members of the Congressional Commerce Committee that oversees the FCC, as well as the president himself. By baldly favoring the interests of one group of Americans over another, the FCC has horrifically damaged American democracy and artistic freedom.
People who want to restrict everyone’s choices are often active in organizations like the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America. Others are in positions of government power, like Texas Governor Rick Perry, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, and former FCC Chairpersons Michael Powell and Kevin Martin. The civic groups donate to political campaigns. Once in power, the politicians give grants to the civic groups, or hire their leaders as consultants. Crusaders and government are going after your viewing choices as a team.
That makes sense from their point of view. Crusaders see that their beloved economic marketplace refutes their values—shows and commercials involving sexuality don’t go away for lack of viewership, they thrive. And crusaders have learned, to their dismay, that their beliefs don’t win in the marketplace of ideas either—while they may have convinced many people that their families are in danger from broadcast material, the public still hasn’t changed their media habits.
Thus, censorship activists conclude that force—the power of the government they claim they want to shrink—is necessary. They want the government to enforce restrictions that neither the commercial marketplace nor the intellectual marketplace can. It’s like schoolyard politics—if you can’t bully someone yourself, get your bigger brother or older cousin to do it.
Many in government, unfortunately, agree. They see their role as providing the big stick the anti-indecency lobby needs when its ideas aren’t persuasive enough to their fellow citizens. These government officials are happy to lend their power to morality crusaders. Various members of Congress and (typically Republican) state legislatures back this “big government” agenda because they can point to the FCC’s work and show their core constituency that they’re responding to them. Even the Tea Party movement’s leaders are unanimously in favor of that “big government” they claim to hate—when it comes to censoring sexually oriented entertainment, documentaries, and news on TV and radio. Morality crusaders like PTC president Tim Winter then take credit for “cleaning up” the airwaves. It’s a win-win for the War on Sex.
In June 2006, Congress passed the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which astronomically increased the penalties against broadcasters for “transmissions of obscene, indecent, and profane material.”20 Because there is no objective definition of any of these terms, “the increased fines will create a chilling effect on otherwise protected speech,” says attorney Larry Walters. “The censorship will be real, but it will be inconsistent, leaving broadcasters in the dark. This is not good for the First Amendment.”21
While “decency” and “morality” groups have littered the American landscape on and off for three centuries, there have been few times in our history when they had more influence over ordinary citizens’ lives than they do today.22 Since 1980, we’ve seen the emergence of Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America, Moral Majority, and other similar groups.
In 2003, two particularly frightening new players emerged, Morality in Media (MiM) and Parents Television Council (PTC). The FCC adopted these groups with terrifying speed and absolutely no counter-balance whatsoever for viewers who tolerate or want sexy material. According to Time magazine, “Almost single-handedly, the PTC has become a national clearinghouse for, and arbiter of, decency.”23
This cozy arrangement, which recently produced the largest broadcaster fines in American history, was exposed by journalist Jeff Jarvis as government-facilitated tyranny of the minority. Here’s the story:
In late 2004, the FCC leveled an incredible $1.2 million fine against the Fox TV network for an episode of Married by America that suggested—not depicted, just suggested—sex. The justification for this enormous fine, said the FCC, was the huge number of complaints it supposedly received.
How many complaints? According to the FCC, 159. Is that staggering enough, that 159 complaints can trigger the largest broadcaster fine in American history, against a show watched by millions?
Wait, it gets worse.
When the FCC’s actual data was released in response to Jarvis’s Freedom of Information Act request, it showed that the complaints came from only 23 individuals. Reports Jarvis:
All but two were virtually identical. In other words, one person took the time to write a letter and 20 other people photocopied or emailed it to the FCC. They all came from an automated complaint factory. … Only two letters were not the form letter. So in the end, that means that a grand total of three citizens bothered to take the time to sit down and actually write a letter of complaint to the FCC. Millions of people watched the show. Three wrote letters of complaint.24
This shocking story is all over the Web—and yet there was virtually no broadcast media coverage. Could the media possibly be feeling intimidated about reporting this, about exposing the shocking bias at the agency that could subsequently fine them and even revoke their licenses? Is this what our free American media have come to?
* * *
Most adult Americans remember the 2004 Super Bowl—or, rather, the nine-sixteenths of a second during which Janet Jackson’s breast was exposed25 during the half-time show—or, rather, the enormous fuss about it that went on and on and on. I remember being interviewed by dozens of radio and TV shows, and newspapers and magazines, about the “terrible” event. Parents complained that their kids had been traumatized—or worse, that they’d been forced to actually talk with their kids about The Breast.
The FCC responded by both fining CBS and working with religious members of Congress to increase FCC fines for “indecency” in the future. But CBS appealed the judgment as arbitrary and wrong-headed; thus began a seven-and-a-half year legal odyssey involving several federal courts, which only ended in November 2011. The FCC lost, and CBS was vindicated (albeit on a technicality). Most people believe the government won’t have the stamina to continue the battle; nevertheless, the moment has achieved iconic status. The Parents Television Council, for example, calls it “the Janet Jackson Striptease Indecency Case,”26 which reflects their adolescent preoccupation with anything that can be considered sexual—and the corresponding outrage they use to psychically distance themselves from their own sinful interests.
In the summer of 2005, the FCC announced the formation of yet another battalion in its war on “indecency.” It hired Liberty University graduate (“Training Champions for Christ”27) Penny Nance to work in its Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis to “advise on indecency issues.”28 Nance founded the Kids First Coalition, a group that fights abortion, cloning, and indecency in the name of “pro-child, pro-family public policy.” Long a vocal anti-pornography crusader, she has frequently testified before Congress. During the 2004 presidential campaign, she appeared on Fox News as a “suburban stay-at-home mom” (a blatant lie) to say that women believe President Bush will “protect our children.”29
In public talks, Nance describes herself as a “victim of pornography”30 because she says a man who once tried to rape her watched porn. In January 2005, Nance signed, along with other activists, an open letter to President Bush, complaining of a “huge indecency problem” on basic cable and a growing indecency threat on satellite radio.
The “indecency problem” Nance was hired (with your tax dollars) to resolve is the legal recreation of tens of millions of law-abiding Americans. She will not attempt to solicit or provide a balanced view or scientific evaluation of broadcast content and its consequences. She will invite input from sincere censors who believe, sincere self-described victims who hurt, sincere parents who are concerned. She doesn’t want input from any of the millions of people who now consume the legal products she will help criminalize. This is not a modern democracy at work.
Penny Nance is now the CEO of Concerned Women for America.
Attorney Paul Cambria has argued many Supreme Court cases, and is past president of the First Amendment Lawyers Association. “What a lot of people don’t understand on this indecency thing for broadcast standards is that it’s supposed to have a community standard element in it, just like the obscenity law does,” he says. “But who is speaking for the community? In all the congressional hearings and everything else they’re having, what component demonstrates the pulse of the [mainstream] adult community as to what … they think the standard should be? Shouldn’t the community have a voice in that? Where’s the survey of the community?”31
What happens when the morality campaign goes head-to-head with Desperate Housewives? In red states, in religious areas, in every single state that passed an anti-gay marriage law, it’s all the same: Grey’s Anatomy is a runaway hit. Ditto CSI: Miami, Glee, Monday Night Football and its half-naked cheerleaders, and ditto commercials for Viagra, lingerie, and beer.
Sure, Christian TV and radio sell—but that’s not where most people go for entertainment. They’re ghettoized, as they haven’t succeeded in the mainstream; there isn’t enough of an audience to drive “the sex stuff” off the air. So crusaders want to truncate the market mechanism and enforce their taste on the entire public.
They use a circular argument—the marketplace should make decisions except where it makes poor decisions. The media’s decisions about sexuality are poor because they’re bad for people. How do we know? They contradict “moral” values.
Both our current government and anti-indecency groups claim the heritage of conservative ideology. But “[FCC commissioners] Powell, Martin, and the corporate-friendly GOP have green-lighted big media companies to capture near-total market control over cable and broadcast television,” says Ben Scott, policy director at Free Press. “Now, the same bunch is upset over the low-cost, high-ratings schlock that media conglomerates pump into the marketplace. [They] must decide if [they’re] free market Republicans or local-values Republicans. When it comes to regulating the media, you can’t have it both ways.”32
As TV started its third decade, 20 years before the Internet, TV critic Clive Barnes put it this way: “Television is the first truly democratic culture—the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.”33 Needless to say, “what people do want” still involves sexual themes, as it has since the days of Shakespeare and the ancient Greeks. As proof, look at the PTC Web site’s listing of weekly TV shows, which it rates “From a family values perspective.”34 Month after month, those earning a red light are a Who’s Who of the most popular shows in America.
How do would-be censors explain this continuing popularity? Do they honestly think people would choose different programs if they had more choice? If so, public radio and TV wouldn’t have such a small audience, a fact that free-market Republicans gleefully point out regularly.
Whenever something on TV is punished—for example, the Madonna/Britney kiss, Janet Jackson’s nipple, Cher or Bono saying “fuck”—Americans vote immediately. And they always vote the same—they want to see it. First they vote by downloading or recording the video clip. For example, the clips of each of these moments are among the most downloaded in Internet history. And “Janet Jackson is still the most TiVo’d moment we’ve ever measured,” according to a company spokesman, eclipsing—what else?—the Madonna/Britney kiss.35 People then vote again by watching the news about the moment and its aftermath. TV stations across America cynically replay the stuff over and over because they know people want to see it. So the moral crusaders’ claim that broadcast indecency is being thrust on us is simply inaccurate, just like the claim that porn is thrust on us.
You may recall the fuss over the racy Terrell Owens/Nicollette Sheridan ad promoting Monday Night Football in 2004. New York Times columnist Frank Rich noted that the spot was replayed around the Internet and dozens of TV shows for several days, among them The View, where Sheridan’s bare back had been merrily paraded at the child-friendly hour of 11:00 a.m. As Aaron Brown of CNN wryly observed, “People were so outraged they had to see it 10 times.”36
The recurring Internet downloading and ubiquitous TV rebroadcasting of taboo moments is real democracy in action, not some spam farm that fakes mass indignation. When the FCC fines a broadcaster for violating “community standards,” why isn’t the fact that the public is actively pursuing the very broadcast moment being fined considered straightforward evidence of the “community standard”? Why isn’t it given the same weight as mass-produced e-mails?
Media crusaders love to talk about kids—you know, those completely innocent, wholesome, asexual beings who wouldn’t even think about sex until their honeymoon if it weren’t for our degenerate culture.
Media crusaders want to shield kids from all sex-related content, advertising, language, jokes, and situations.37 This is a radical enterprise, with a goal so comprehensive that attempting it (much less succeeding) would have to create broad collateral damage—which crusaders brush off as a distant, secondary consideration compared with their crucial goal.
What are they trying to accomplish? To raise children who are ignorant about sexuality except in the vaguest sense: That it’s an adults-only thing reserved for spiritually oriented, procreating married couples, and that it can kill you or ruin your life. This would make American kids the least sophisticated, least prepared for adulthood in the Western world.
Looking for sex in every corner, searching for “homos” in the same paranoid, bug-eyed way that their cultural predecessors looked for “Commies” a half-century ago, the crusaders have gone after kids’ TV programming, both commercial and non-commercial. They’ve gone after Barney, Buster, and SpongeBob SquarePants for alleged sexual offenses.38
The only explanation is that these adults are obsessed with sex. They see it where their kids don’t—in many cases can’t, developmentally—and want to protect their kids from something that doesn’t exist. That says a lot about their obsession and their fear.
You’d never know it when talking to decency groups, but parents already have many tools they can use to control what their kids see on TV. Why aren’t decency groups talking about these tools ad nauseam? But the goal of morality groups and pro-censorship government isn’t really to protect kids, it’s ultimately to control what adults can see or hear.
That said, here are some tools—most of them free—that parents can use to control their kids’ viewing:
Every TV has one. A perfect solution for all parents who don’t want their kids to see something of which they disapprove.
Every TV has one. It not only takes kids away from what parents don’t want them to see, it guides them toward what parents want them to see. And as attorney Cary Wiggins reminds us, “Even though it’s called a remote control, please use it on your television, not mine.”39
In the mid 1990s, the broadcasting industry created a voluntary ratings system evaluating violence and sexuality. A monitoring board ensures accurate and consistent ratings. There are seven categories (three more than big-screen movies use) to help parents determine which programs are suitable for their children.
Rating labels appear in the corner of the screen during the first 15 seconds of each program and are digitally encoded into the program itself.
Every TV larger than 13 inches manufactured after 2000 contains this technology, allowing parents to block programs that they don’t want their children to watch. Using the remote control, parents can program the V-chip to block shows based on their ratings or other criteria in advance—so the blocking works even if parents aren’t home.
All cable TV subscribers can request a “lockbox” from their cable operator, which can be set to prevent the viewing of any channel a parent dislikes. All U.S. cable operators are required to make lockboxes available.
All satellite providers such as DIRECTV allow parents to easily restrict their kids’ unsupervised viewing by blocking shows with certain ratings, locking out entire channels, setting limited viewing times, or blocking specific shows or movies.
A variety of products can be purchased and installed which delete offensive language from programs. Generally, when a word that’s in their dictionary (e.g., “ass,” “jesus,” “boobs”) is detected, the sound is momentarily muted. A substitute word is then either spoken or flashed on the screen. This allows viewers to watch a broader range of programs without fear of hearing something unwanted.
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By giving parents powerful and sophisticated ways to finely tune the exact TV viewing kids can do in their homes, these tools render blunt, society-wide or community-wide restrictions obsolete. A few years ago, the cable and satellite industries launched a campaign to educate parents about these technologies, but this helpful program was opposed by a powerful alliance of family advocacy groups and activists with close ties to major evangelical ministries and pro-censorship advocates in the Bush Administration.
Pro-censorship groups like Morality in Media, Parents Television Council, and Focus on the Family bemoan the “trash” on TV and radio. Observing the gradual changes in the language and situations being broadcast, they demand to know, “How far will it go? Where will it end?”
The answer is simple: The continuing evolution of radio and TV broadcast of sexual themes and language will “end” when audiences, through their viewing choices, want it to. Despite the political manipulations of pro-censorship government and civic leaders, American viewers are still not prepared to end this evolution.
There’s also the trivial issue of the U.S. Constitution that’s in the way. God Bless America.
In one sense, this is all looking in the rear-view mirror. In just a few years the idea that TV is important enough to patrol will seem as quaint as the idea of licensing typewriters, carriage-horses, or gas streetlamps. The convergence of your phone, tablet, computer, and streaming audio and video will drastically change both the content of TV and the way that it’s watched, the way it has already changed the music industry and newspaper industry.
And so the decency watchdogs have begun to expand their mission. Morality in Media is now obsessed with pornography, sex work, and their alleged connection with trafficking and violence. The Parents Television Council is also focused on video games, cinema, and online video.
There’s also an increasing quaintness about the current batch of FCC cases. Viewers horrified by a few seconds of bare butt? Or the word “shit”? How twentieth century. These cases are continuing through our courts because they’re addressing unsettled legal principles, not because they’re addressing relevant content.
Censors see these cases and issues as symbolically important—an “electronic Maginot Line,” as attorney Bob Corn-Revere puts it.40 And indeed, like the original Maginot Line, all these other media are simply going around the old-fashioned line that the government constructed a long time ago in a different world.
Despite the availability of free, 24-hour-a-day government-regulated network TV, three-quarters of American homes choose to pay for some kind of additional TV service (not counting broadband, Netflix, etc.). Somehow censors insist that these people are all passive victims of programming “filth.” Referring to the upcoming negotiations over the regulation of cable and satellite service, “It will be war,” predicted Rick Schatz, president of the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families, a Christian ministry. “There will be tremendous grassroots pressure brought to bear.”41 Tremendous, yes; grassroots, not so much.
These activists who want to comfort themselves by controlling what you and I are allowed to watch still don’t get that television viewing is a choice, not a right.