Minuet over Censorship

Broadcasters usually consider TV censorship a menace only slightly less lethal than poison gas. Once released, they say, even the smallest amount of enforced control over programming will inexorably expand until it eventually envelops and deadens the most remote corners of the communications industry. Yet at its annual convention in Washington, D.C., last week, the National Association of Broadcasters--which includes station owners and networks--took a tentative step toward adopting a plan for the industry's first version of formal censorship.

The proposal is largely the result of a long campaign by Rhode Island Senator John O. Pastore, for the past 14 years chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications. Like many other Americans, Pastore is troubled by what he takes to be egregious sex, "blatant cruelty and obscene sadism" on the tube. Among other things, he has criticized suggestive commercials (Noxzema's "Take It All Off" ad) and overly permissive programs (ABC's short-lived Turn On). After five days of Senate hearings, Pastore renewed a standing appeal for rigid, centralized self-censorship. But this time he told the broadcasters how .to do it.

Delicate Dance. In the past, television's usually toothless Code Review Board, composed of station and network executives, has concerned itself with little more than after-the-fact monitoring of occasional programs and commercials. Television can only be cleaned up, Pastore said, if the N.A.B. agrees to give the Code Authority real power--specifically to prescreen all network programs. Under Pastore's projected plan, Code Authority members could simply order deletions of "offensive" material from network programs before they went on the air.

Cynically viewed, Pastore's impassioned appeal may produce what one observer described as just another "Washington minuet"--a delicate ritual in which broadcasters go through elaborate motions but end up pretty much in the same spot where they began. Two networks, ABC and NBC, at first seemed receptive to a new authority, then hastily sidestepped, insisting that they--and not any Code Authority--must have final say on whether or not to air programs.

Pointing out that individual networks now police their own programs, CBS President Frank Stanton refused to flirt with centralized censorship at all. Any control body, he insisted, even one made up of other members of the industry, would be impractical and dangerous. "It would only be a matter of time," he said, "before the Government would go to the Code Authority about our performance--initially to inquire, then to urge. This would spell the beginning of the end of our independence."

Sword of Damocles. Despite such network fears, some stronger form of program censorship may yet prevail. One possible way to bring it about: pressure on individual stations. In the N.A.B., individual stations outnumber and outvote the three networks. And in recent months, TV station owners have become increasingly jittery over the activities of the suddenly rambunctious Federal Communications Commission. Though the FCC has no direct jurisdiction over the networks, it can influence individual stations through its licensing power. Recently, the FCC has begun to question once-automatic license renewals and seriously consider competing applications from would-be broadcasters. Well aware of the station owners' fears, Pastore has made it clear that he opposes any "sword of Damocles over the heads of broadcasters at renewal time"--giving a broad hint that he might favor legislation to change FCC procedures and facilitate license renewals. One implicit condition: that local stations support his beefed-up Television Code.

Even if adopted, Pastore's watchdog plan could prove about as effective as having the National Rifle Association regulate gun sales. Only 399 of the nation's 619 TV stations subscribe to the N.A.B. Code. It has no control at all over program syndicators, not to mention 220 individual stations producing their own programs. Even where it would have authority, the N.A.B. body would confront an enormous task. Either it would try to supervise the entire production process for every TV show or it would be forced to rely on each network to submit its most controversial programs.

The most ominous potential of any centralized regulation, of course, lies in its possible abuse. Overzealous but underimaginative censors might not stop at snipping out broads and brawls but might press on to new frontiers of blandness. Legitimate controversy or merely inconvenient opinion aired on television would also fall under the censor's watchful eye. "What is proposed," says Leonard Freeman, producer of CBS's Hawaii Five-O, "is Orwellian in its prospect. We are now overly cautious; the result is a vacuum years behind the audience."

Public Apologies. Whatever becomes of his plan, Pastore and the hearings may have already stirred the network executives to sanitize their programs as never before. CBS has refused to ease restrictions on what can and cannot be said on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Two of last month's Tonight Show guest hosts, Bill Cosby and Jerry Lewis, made public apologies for ill-received wisecracks, which had nothing to do with sex or violence. At the N.A.B. convention, the industry's nervous mood was apotheosized by one Catholic priest who, in a luncheon invocation, prayed that God sympathize with "oppressed broadcasters--accused of aiding and abetting materialism, perversion, violence and crime."

Bad taste, and especially violence, are certainly valid issues for concern. But so is vapid programming. The networks are content to argue that no method has reliably demonstrated what television actually does to people. Critics urging censorship by seeking piecemeal suppression of scenes and words before studying the larger, long-term effects of TV may be straining at gnats while swallowing camels. Some help may come in October, when the U.S. Surgeon General is scheduled to present a nationwide study of the influence of TV violence on children. Until then, no one can be fully prepared to go to the barricades over the uses and abuses of the unrelenting eye.

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