Another Kind of Ratings War

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The campaign to take the sex and violence out of television

Television is the most widely shared experience in this diffuse country. That alone would make it a natural target for zealots of the New Right, intent on proving their political muscle. TV, moreover, is omnipresent in home and family life, and Christian conservatives see the family as endangered. They contend that TV reflects--indeed, often promotes--the gratuitous sex, profanity and violence of contemporary society, thus bringing moral decay into the home.

The Coalition for Better Television (CBTV), which claims to represent 400 conservative organizations, including the Rev. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, has been threatening to attack network TV's Achilles' heel by a consumer boycott of its skittish sponsors. The head of CBTV is the Rev. Donald Wildmon, a Methodist preacher from Mississippi, who for the past four years has been monitoring TV as founder of one of the coalition's member groups, the National Federation for Decency. Relying on a new list of TV's most and least "constructive" shows, put together from a survey made by 4,000 "trained monitors" between March and May, Wildmon may now ask consumers to reject the products of companies that most consistently advertised on shows featuring sex and violence. The coalition claimed that 5 million Americans were already committed to participate in the boycott and that 15 million more sympathizers could be solicited by direct mail and newspaper advertising.

There is reason to doubt that such a boycott could succeed. But the would-be censors appear to be winning the war before the battle begins. Already the networks are sounding defensive, warning that if sex is successfully restrained, censorship of news and opinion will follow. Civil libertarians are readying a $2 million countercampaign in support of diversity, called People for the American Way and featuring TV public-service ads produced by Norman Lear, creator of All in the Family. (Moral Majority has announced that Falwell will demand reply time whenever a Lear ad appears.) Most important, advertisers are uneasy. Chairman Owen Butler of Procter & Gamble, TV's biggest customer ($486.3 million in commercials last year), announced in mid-June that within the past year his company had pulled out of 50 TV movies and series episodes, including seven of the ten series that Wildmon has cited as "top sex-oriented."* Last week representatives of at least four companies--including Warner-Lambert, SmithKline, Gillette and Phillips Petroleum--conferred privately with CBTV, some in apparent hope that Wildmon would excuse them from the boycott hit list if they would go and sin no more. Wildmon in turn announced: "I think consultation and conversation and compromise are far superior to confrontation. We've always said that a boycott is a last resort." Exulted Cal Thomas, vice president of communications for the Moral Majority: "It's like the prime rate. When No. 1 announces, a lot of others follow. The response we've gotten from advertisers since the Procter & Gamble speech has been very gratifying."

The 4,000 monitors who produced the latest survey each watched 12 to 16 hours of prime-time TV this spring. According to Wildmon, they were instructed on how to record the frequency of "sexually suggestive comments, inside or outside marriage," of profanity such as "God," "hell" and "damn," of crude language such as "crap," "horny" and "whore," and of incidents of violence, which was defined as "attempts to do bodily harm to a person." Judgments were necessarily subjective. An objectionable "sexual-intercourse scene" occurred whenever the monitor was "left with the opinion that sexual intercourse occurred," on screen or off, inside or outside marriage. Monitors were instructed to jot down what products were advertised on each program. Wildmon then calculated, by computer, the average incidence of sex, violence and profanity that a company sponsored per 30-sec. commercial. According to Wildmon, the monitors were recruited mostly from church groups and were trained by volunteers who showed video tapes and conducted practice sessions. Otherwise their work was unsupervised. Wildmon's staff of two had little capacity to verify the findings; sometimes, he concedes, teams of monitors reported different scores for the same show. Who are the monitors? Wildmon refuses to give out any names, saying they were promised anonymity. Efforts by networks and other news organizations--including nationwide inquiries by TIME correspondents--have failed to unearth anyone who contributed to the survey.

Even if the survey was as "scientific" as Wildmon claims, there is little proof that the would-be censors of CBTV represent any broader group than the conservative Christian organizations from which they were rather casually drawn. TIME correspondents last week found no upsurge in protest calls and letters to networks, local stations, sponsors or retail stores. CBS had received only about 50 letters on the proposed boycott; half opposed the idea. NBC Vice Chairman Richard Salant said he had recently received 'thousands" of Christian brochures, some with accompanying letters, a pattern familiar to networks and rarely taken seriously: almost all were protesting Love, Sidney, a new situation comedy that is being considered for NBC's fall schedule with a homosexual as the title character. Dow Chemical, which was listed as the second "least constructive" advertiser in a December 1980 report by Wildmon, has received about 100 letters of protest.

A recent ABC poll of 1,400 people chosen at random showed that only 13% supported a lobbying campaign to change TV content. Only about 2% said they would support a boycott to serve the coalition goals and had boycotted products in the past. Moreover, avowed members of the Moral Majority (6.6% of the sample) had the same program preferences as other Americans.

Nonetheless, as advertisers are aware, the country has become more conservative. Leaders of the New Right--Falwell, among them--have become more sophisticated in applying political pressure. Among much of the public there is a built-up resentment of what is seen as network arrogance, notably an unwillingness to admit TV's impact on social change. As numerous critics of television have argued, networks tell advertisers that people can be induced to spend money by a single 30-sec. spot, then tell the public that no one's beliefs are influenced by watching a four-hour drama.

The networks have two principal answers to the charge that they promote sex and violence at the expense of family values. One is that they have their own system of internal censorship: large departments of program practices scrutinize all scripts for sex, violence, profanity, factual accuracy and fairness. The philosophical answer is that the networks are blamed unfairly for changes in society that TV merely mirrors, often years late. TV, they say, is not salacious, just realistic. Wildmon and his supporters reply that whatever a network publicizes, it certifies as normal. Conservative critics also argue that despite the long-running success of Disney series and Little House on the Prairie, TV is hardly more diverse today than it was in the era of Ozzie and Harriet. Once nearly every show was pious; now nearly every show is racy. Among the "realistic" subjects that Wildmon dislikes most: prostitution, smirky references to extramarital sex, and homosexuality. A chief program target now is Love, Sidney, starring Tony Randall. Sidney is a middleaged, sexually inactive gay who "adopts" an unwed mother and her child and so at last fulfills his dream of having a household. To Randall, who regards Sidney as one of the best roles of his career, the show is an upbeat, moral story of how people need families. To Wildmon, it is a caricature of what a family ought to be. His vehement reaction--to a show he has never seen--defines a major difference between Wildmon and the networks. He says that some subject matter can never be appropriate, no matter how it is handled. Why, then, have Wildmon and CBTV not targeted for boycott the networks' afternoon soap operas, which are often far raunchier than anything seen at night? Wildmon's answer: prime time "is where the viewer is and where the money is."

There is no question that many Americans, by no means sympathetic to the Moral Majority, feel that TV needs to be cleaned up. Who is to do it? In deference to the First Amendment, the Federal Communications Commission, Congress and the courts are either unwilling or unable to censor program content. If CBTV does it through a sponsor boycott, some who are sympathetic to the goals will oppose the tactic, or worry about the ramifications. Says Alan Reitman of the American Civil Liberties Union: "While every group has a right to protest, there's countervailing civil liberties concern that what the coalition is calling for is also a civil liberties concern. This is a situation where you have the First Amendment competing against itself." The A.C.L.U.'s position, as Reitman puts it, is that the coalition's member groups "have a perfectly legal right to express their views and to boycott," just as supporters of United Farm Workers Leader Cesar Chavez had a right to boycott California lettuce. The area of uncertainty, for the A.C.L.U. and for others, is that this particular boycott impinges uncertainly on the Constitution's guarantee of free speech.

Other critics have different objections. William Fore, head of the communications commission of the National Council of Churches, has supported many boycotts and is a longtime opponent of televised sex and violence. He questions the use of boycotts when there are other remedies available--for example, share holder proposals at annual meetings to ban company advertisements on excessively violent shows. One such N.C.C. petition succeeded, Fore said, in persuading General Mills executives to adopt the policy voluntarily. Peggy Charren of Newtonville, Mass., a Boston suburb, is head of Action for Children's Television, which has successfully lobbied for better juvenile programming. Her group opposes the coalition's crusade, she says, "because ACT believes that the Moral Majority is not out to improve children's television but rather is out to control communications in this country" by narrowing choices through censorship.

Some members of Wildmon's coali tion contend that is not so. Says Karen Davis of Fort Worth, Texas, local leader of Christian Women's National Concerns: "Our group is not so much for limitation of TV shows, as it is to get shows that are of a high quality on TV." Most coalition spokesmen, however, appear to share Falwell's goal of making every program on the tube suitable for family viewing. For jxample, Dan Fore, Moral Majority's New York State chairman, says that TV should return to shows like I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners. Some critics note that those shows, whatever their merits as sitcoms, were stereotyped in their presentation of husband and wife behavior in the household.

One unanswered question is whether the coalition is merely a front for the Moral Majority or for other increasingly influential political activists of the New Right. The Moral Majority helps finance the coalition but denies it is one of Moral Majority's arms, and Wildmon says he is not a Moral Majority member. Funds for Wildmon's Federation for Decency are being raised by Richard Viguerie, a direct mail specialist who has collected millions for North Carolina's Senator Jesse Helms and other conservative heroes. "The subject of sex in the media is probably going to be the No. 1 issue that conservatives are going to be concerned with after you get past President Reagan's economic and defense programs," Viguerie told TIME last week. "As conservatives, we want the American people to become aware of what is on television these days, and we want them to know who is sponsoring it. Then let them make their decision. We're not looking for laws or legislation. We just want everybody to understand what garbage is on television."

Wildmon seems sincerely convinced the networks are willfully wrecking America. He wrote recently in Conservative Digest, which Viguerie publishes, that networks "by design" have taught that "sexual immorality, violence, profanity, vulgarity, etc. were values worthy of imitation and emulation." On the deepest level, Wildmon and his fellow protesters yearn for a society-wide reaffirmation of the tradition of childhood innocence. They think children should be shielded from too much worldly knowledge too soon. Because the conservatives place so much emphasis on family and parenthood, they are ready to sacrifice adults' freedom of choice. There is a gruff, honest passion in many of their complaints. Says the Rev. Albert Gagnier of Brockton, Mass., a Moral Majority member and father of three: "I paid money for my TV set just like everybody else and I expect to get good programming out of it." So long as the air waves are public he deserves to find some programs that suit him. The problem is that Gagnier Wildmon and their compatriots want to be the sole judges of what is good.

--By William A. Henry III

Reported by Robert C. Wurmstedt/Tupelo

* A smaller survey last fall included on its "least constructive" list ABC shows Taxi and Vega$ and CBS hits WKRP in Cincinnati and The Dukes of Hazzard. NBC, lowest in commercial competition, had five of the "top ten constructive" shows, including Quincy and Little House on the Prairie.

With reporting by Robert C. Wurmstedt

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