The media watchdog group Parents Television Council publicly commended NBC last month when the network announced plans to make the 8 p.m. hour a time for family-friendly viewing. Days later, NBC aired an episode of "30 Rock" in that time slot that didn't strike the PTC as fitting the family-friendly category.
The episode centered on a fake reality show called "MILF Island." The acronym stands for "Mothers I'd Like to . . . ." NBC's idea of family viewing includes a sexy mother taking off her bikini top (with digital blurring) in front of eighth-grade boys, and the cast making obscene hand gestures that blurring fails to hide. NBC's family-oriented dialogue includes such family-funny lines as "erection cove," "eating bugs to earn tampons" and "what the frak?," an obvious attempt to substitute a word not on the FCC's sanction list for one that is.
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NBC executive Alan Wurtzel told an industry publication, "We've always felt that the people who get the jokes aren't going to be offended." Translation: Only ignorant people could possibly be offended.
If NBC thinks this is the kind of show that families gather to watch, the cultural divide between the entertainment industry and the majority of Americans is massive. Clearly, network television is trying to make a statement to the FCC and the federal courts about what content should be allowed on publicly owned airwaves.
The networks and their activist professional organizations are spending millions of dollars fighting federal laws that prohibit indecent and profane communication on broadcast airwaves. NBC and Fox are appealing decisions related to celebrities' indecent utterances on live awards broadcasts. The Supreme Court will hear the matter of so-called "fleeting expletives" next fall. Many other cases are bottled up at the FCC, pending guidance from these eventual court decisions.
Shrill spokesmen for media organizations are in full voice pushing a network vision of what constitutes suitable content. Fox's appeal told the FCC that it shouldn't make "subjective assessments about the morality of a program." Of course, Fox thinks its own assessment of program content is fully objective.
Jonathan Rintels of the Center for Creative Voices in Media challenged the FCC in a published interview to clear up the confusion: ". . . the line has to be clearly drawn and crystal clear so that creative people can speak and write and create up to that line." He added that he didn't think the FCC could actually draw such a line.
The New York Times editorialized that FCC indecency enforcement has done "serious damage to free speech," but failed to indicate how.
Network executives are apparently oblivious to the sentiments of the audience. Network primetime viewership dropped again this year. Nearly two-thirds of viewers say programming is getting worse, compared to only 22 percent who think it is improving. Four out of five Americans think there is too much sex, violence and rough language on television.
The upcoming Supreme Court decision about fleeting expletives could settle this tug-of-war for years to come. The court could rule broadly, either supporting the FCC's indecency enforcement or allowing broadcasters to receive First Amendment protection for such content. If the court rules narrowly, however, focusing just on the occasional unscripted bad word, this argument will carry on.
Andrew Jay Schwartzman of the Media Access Project hopes the court will side with broadcasters, of course, and has criticized the FCC's current enforcement as "incoherent and overbroad." He says the FCC "has chilled the creative process for the writers, directors and producers we represent." Not enough yet, apparently, to chill NBC from running a "30 Rock" "MILF" program as suitable for family hour.
McCall is professor of communications at DePauw University in Greencastle.
[Editor's note: Here's the comment under this article by Jonathan Rintels of the Center for Creative Voices in Media -- one of the "shrill spokesmen" that McCall mentions in his article.
This article names the Center for Creative Voices in Media as one of the networks' "activist professional organizations" and me as one of their "shrill spokesmen." Neither label is accurate. Creative Voices is dedicated to protecting Constitutional rights to free speech and expression, and is therefore often critical of the networks for infringing on the free speech rights of independent and diverse media artists. And the quote of mine is hardly shrill; it simply states the law.
The U.S. Court of Appeals recently ruled that the FCC's indecency decisions have been both inaccurate and overly broad, resulting in "arbitrary and capricious" enforcement that violates the law and Constitution. By engaging in that same kind of analysis to make its points against content the author doesn't like, but millions of other Americans do, the article inadvertently illustrates exactly the problem with indecency enforcement the Court - and I - were talking about.
Jonathan Rintels
Creative Voices
5/31/2008 8:11:05 AM