The Decency Police

By James Poniewozik

The Parents Television Council believes that too much prime-time TV is indecent. So indecent that it never misses a show. In the group's Alexandria, Va., offices, five analysts sit at desks with a VCR, a TV and a computer. They tape every hour of prime-time network TV, and a lot of cable. CSI. The Apprentice. God help them, even Reba. And they watch. Every filthy second.

This afternoon, PTC analyst Kristine Looney is sitting in her cubicle, whose bookshelf holds volumes by Ann Coulter and G. Gordon Liddy. Headphones over her ears, hand on the remote, she is watching the March 13 episode of Crossing Jordan. Suddenly, she hits the pause button. Why? "'Damn,'" she says. "And also they were talking about drugs." Looney, 25, transcribes the quote--"Damn. The second suitcase is still out there"--and it goes into the Entertainment Tracking System (ETS), the PTC's database on more than 100,000 hours of programming. "We track even those minor swears," says Looney's supervisor, Melissa Caldwell, "because it's a way of tracking trends." The ETS, in the words of PTC executive director Tim Winter, logs "every incident of sexual content, violence, profanity, disrespect for authority and other negative content." The ETS analysts don't monitor premium channels, which is just as well, because an episode of Deadwood would presumably crash the system. The ETS is thoroughly indexed by theme--"Threesome," "Masturbation," "Obscene Gesture." With it, the group can detect patterns of sleaze and curses and spotlight advertisers who buy on naughty shows. It is a meticulously compiled, cross-referenced, multimegabyte Alexandria Library of smut.

The Entertainment Tracking System--it sounds like something the Pentagon would have if we had fought a war to depose Viacom's Sumner Redstone instead of Saddam Hussein. And in a way, the ETS is the nerve center of a war: the War on Indecency. It is a war that had a shot seen round the world--Janet Jackson at the 2004 Super Bowl--but had been simmering much longer. It is a war with strange allies and enemies: it pits free-market conservatives against family-values conservatives, free-speech liberals against Big Government liberals, and a normally pro-business Congress and White House against megacorporations. (Among them is TIME's parent company, Time Warner, which owns a major cable business, the WB broadcast network and several cable channels, including HBO and TNT.) A war that has TV programmers scrambling for cover--or at least pixelation--and has led Howard Stern to decamp from his broadcast-radio shock show for a satellite-radio gig in January.

And that war is only getting hotter. Over the past year, a reawakened Federal Communications Commission (FCC), prodded by values activists, has rebuked or fined broadcast networks including CBS, Fox and NBC for flesh and F bombs. Now Congress is gearing up to give the FCC stronger weapons: far steeper fines and possibly the power to regulate decency on cable and satellite radio. (That means you, Howard.) George W. Bush last week named a new FCC chairman, Kevin Martin, who talks even tougher on decency than the departed chair, Michael Powell. To emboldened decency monitors, this is a chance to tame an out-of-control pop culture in which drunk Real World housemates have three-ways in hot tubs and shock jocks broadcast live sex acts on air. To broadcasters--and many viewers--it's the censorial hysteria that's out of control, as when Fox, in a rerun of Family Guy, chose to remove the bare bottom of the character Stewie, who is 1) a baby and 2) a cartoon. From Washington to Hollywood to your living room, the air war is in full effect.

ON THE FRONT LINES

It is a heady time to be the man who commands the ETS, and a busy one. L. Brent Bozell spun off the Parents Television Council in 1995 from his Media Research Center, a watchdog group that monitors media bias. The cop drama NYPD Blue had recently debuted to controversy (and huge ratings), and, as Bozell puts it, "suddenly it became artistic to see Dennis Franz's rear end." In 1998 the PTC launched a membership drive that Bozell says netted 500,000 members. (The group now claims a million.) "We awoke a sleeping giant," he says.

The Jackson incident gave the giant a hotfoot. Before that--despite Powell's reputation as Howard Stern's Inspector Javert--the group found the former chair unresponsive to its concerns. ("I don't want the government as my nanny," Powell said in 2001.) Winter, a lifelong Democrat who heads the PTC's Los Angeles and Alexandria offices (to Hollywood, he's the good cop to Bozell's bad cop), says, "We embarrass the FCC. We prove that they're not doing their job, and they are embarrassed."

Almost single-handedly, the PTC has become a national clearinghouse for, and arbiter of, decency (though other groups, like the Rev. Donald Wildmon's American Family Association, remain active in the cause as well). It has focused heavily on advertisers; for instance, it claims to have driven away 50 sponsors from FX's edgy Nip/Tuck and The Shield. It offers program-content reviews and other tools for parents, who, Bozell stresses, have the chief responsibility for their kids. "It's not as simple as 'It's all Hollywood's fault,'" he says. And the PTC has harnessed technology: besides the ETS, it says it has an e-mail list of 125,000 "online members," and its website offers complaint form letters and streaming video clips of TV episodes so that visitors can watch, be offended and click to zap off a letter.

There's plenty out there to offend. TV's mores have become looser in just a few years. In 1999 it was shocking for Fox's sitcom Action to use obscenities that were bleeped out. Now the same words are bleeped routinely (often barely) all over network TV--and go unbleeped on basic-cable networks like FX and ESPN, let alone Showtime and HBO. In an episode of Fox's since-canceled Keen Eddie, three men enlist a hooker to arouse a horse to extract semen from him. The PTC recently protested an episode of NBC's Medium in which the police burst into a bedroom to find a suspect in bed--with a two-week-old corpse.

As that recent example shows, it sometimes seems as if the Janet Jackson aftermath changed very little. It has--but in scattershot and inconsistent ways. In November, 65 ABC affiliates refused to air the uncut war movie Saving Private Ryan because of its profanity--although it had run without incident twice before. "It's a shame people couldn't see this patriotic film," said former Democratic presidential candidate General Wesley Clark, criticizing the FCC for waiting until February to rule that the film was not indecent. "They deserve an opportunity to see as much of the unvarnished truth as possible." (Even the PTC, incidentally, didn't object to Ryan's airing.) In February PBS advised member stations to air a bowdlerized version of a Frontline documentary about the war in Iraq because the uncut version also had soldiers swearing.

In the March 7 episode of the sitcom Two and a Half Men, creator Chuck Lorre inserted a statement, which flashed onscreen for a second, protesting that CBS had made him trim a scene that showed the naked back of a young woman--a common enough sight on crime dramas and, say, shampoo commercials. "My problem," he wrote, "is knowing that I work in an industry, or perhaps I should say a culture, that is more comfortable showing a dead naked body than a live one." Says David Nevins, president of Imagine Entertainment Television, which produces 24 and Arrested Development: "The climate has definitely changed in a significant way, and the networks are under enormous pressure."

But though the PTC has a loud voice, just whom they speak for is debatable. Last year, in response to viewer complaints, the FCC levied its largest TV fine ever, $1.2 million, against Fox for an episode of the reality show Married by America, which featured strippers covered in whipped cream. The commission said the broadcast had generated 159 letters of complaint. Jeff Jarvis, a former TV critic who writes the blog BuzzMachine.com filed a Freedom of Information Act request to see the letters. Because of multiple mailings, the letters actually came from just 23 people, 21 of whom used a form.

In other words, three people composing letters of complaint precipitated a seven-digit fine. "The problem," argues Jarvis, "is that the media swallows [the data] whole, and it takes on a life of its own. There was no flood of letters. It was a trickle." The PTC strongly denies trying to create an illusory mass of outraged citizens. Of the 1.1 million complaints filed with the FCC last year, Winter says, only about 230,000 came from the PTC.

The larger question is, Do the PTC and other decency campaigners simply want the freedom to find safe zones for their kids? Or do they want to bring you into the safe zone too--if necessary, by cleaning up shows that you have chosen to watch? The slogan that greets visitors to the PTC's website is "Because our children are watching." But for some decency advocates, the problem is also that someone else's children are watching--it's the problem, which both liberal and conservative parents experience, of being exposed to "secondhand smut." Jack Thompson is a Coral Gables, Fla., attorney who filed a series of complaints against Stern that resulted in a $495,000 fine against Clear Channel Communications. A decency hard-liner--he thinks shock jock Stern should be in jail--Thompson doesn't buy the argument that parents should just turn off the TV or radio. "It isn't necessarily what we keep our kids from," he says, "but our inability to keep other kids from certain material, who then share it with our kids in school and elsewhere. It's like dumping toxic waste in a playground."

BRINGING IN THE LAW

There is no shortage of volunteers to legislate decency. A bill that overwhelmingly passed in the House would increase indecency fines to $500,000 (from $32,500 for stations and $11,000 for individual performers). A Senate bill introduced last week by John D. Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, and Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, also ups the ante to $500,000, plus would bring cable and satellite under FCC purview, though vaguely. Yet most frightening to media executives are the warnings of Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska and the powerful chairman of the Commerce Committee, that he may push his own legislation to curb cable. "Eighty-five percent of the people watching televisions today are watching through cable, but they think they're watching local TV," he says. "They have to have some protection."

If the laws pass, the FCC's Martin is likely to be aggressive with them. In the past, he criticized some decisions during Powell's tenure as too lenient--such as not fining Fox for the horse-prostitute liaison on Keen Eddie--and called for fines not only to be stiffer but also to be assessed "per utterance," not per incident (one unbleeped Dave Chappelle routine, and you're in the poorhouse). He also wants to restore the "family hour" to prime time. Decency advocates are big fans. "He can send the signal that the agency has to get serious," says Bozell. And--Nip/Tuck viewers, take heed--he has spoken favorably about regulating cable and satellite to "level the playing field."

Is that possible? The reason the government can regulate broadcast TV and radio at all is that it owns the air. The FCC licenses frequencies on the airwaves, a public resource. In return, broadcasters must meet public-service requirements and obey decency rules, which ban "language or material that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory activities or organs." That's why the FCC can police four-letter words on NBC but not in a movie or this magazine. (Pornography is different, because the law distinguishes "obscenity" from "indecency.")

Cable TV doesn't use those airwaves. It transmits over cables laid and paid for by private industry. So it's questionable whether any extension of the FCC's powers to cable would be constitutional. Likewise, many legal experts think the fact that satellite radio requires a subscription fee would make it tough for regulations there to stand up in court. "I'd love to see cable and satellite covered," says conservative Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas. "But I just think you have limitations."

Yet the mere threat of legislation can create a chill. Law professor Robert O'Neil, director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, calls this "regulation by raised eyebrow. If it goes too far, it gets out of hand. Then the government is at risk of acting beyond its constitutional powers." And that chill can have effects far beyond what the FCC is empowered to do directly. Says Shield creator Shawn Ryan: "There will be things that we will never see, that are victims of this mind-set. Nobody is really brave enough to take away the shows that people love. But it will have an effect on shows that the networks look at and decide aren't even worth producing."

Even more daunting to broadcasters is uncertainty. They say they have no idea what is acceptable now, and the FCC won't spell it out. Contrary to popular belief--and George Carlin's seven-words-you-can't-say-on-TV routine--there are no stone tablets to clarify that thou shalt never utter this word or show that body part. The FCC will rule on indecency after the fact--sometimes twice. At the 2003 Golden Globes, singer Bono of U2 called his band's winning Best Original Song from a Film "f___ing brilliant." In October 2003, the FCC ruled that the expletive was not indecent, because Bono was not describing a sex act. The following March, the commission reversed itself, though it did not fine NBC. After the ABC affiliates passed on Saving Private Ryan--which uses the same expletive in the same nonliteral way--the commission said the film was not indecent because of its critical praise and wartime context.

"You don't know where the line is," says John Ridley, a novelist and a TV and film writer who has written for cable and broadcast, "and that's what's scaring people." To better draw the line, industry sources tell TIME, broadcasters are considering a court test case--possibly even trying to overturn the 1978 ruling that defined the FCC's indecency standard, on the grounds of inconsistency. "There are two difficulties" that the FCC faces, says a broadcast executive. "One is that extreme [regulatory] positions are going to run into constitutional problems. The second is inconsistent and vague rulings are going to run into constitutional problems." Another strategy for networks is to argue that the existence of the V chip--a device, mandated on all television sets 13 in. or larger manufactured since 2000, that allows parents to block content considered suspect--demonstrates that there are less intrusive means of controlling content. The PTC counters that the V chip is not ubiquitous or widely used enough and that the voluntary ratings system it draws on is faulty.

The FCC also has the power to makes regulatory decisions--from mergers to ownership rules--worth billions to media companies. That alone can be powerful incentive to self-censor. One proposal by Senator Stevens--and a longtime goal of the PTC's--is to make cable companies offer subscribers a bundle of channels rated according to their content. They could either buy channels separately or choose only a family-friendly "tier" of channels. That would be a boon for viewers who don't want to subsidize MTV's spring-break parties, but media companies claim it would raise prices and drive smaller channels out of business.

In any event, it would roil a very profitable business. And so last week Disney broke ranks with its media brethren and backed FCC regulation of cable--as an alternative to Congress imposing `a la carte offerings. (Disney's cable holdings include tamer channels like ABC Family and The Disney Channel, but its ESPN often lets profanities fly.) Some broadcast executives, meanwhile, have called for decency control over cable so that they could better compete with cable channels. The greatest hope for those who want to extend the state's power over media may be in the fact that most executives would rather lose freedom than money.

SO WHAT'S FILTH?

Given the postelection focus on "moral values," indecency has been even more oversimplified as a red-state-vs.-blue-state issue. But it doesn't break neatly along Republican and Democrat lines. It is one of the few issues capable of uniting, on one side, Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern, and on the other, New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. If the FCC is strengthened, Limbaugh has argued, what happens when a future Democratic Administration decides that conservative talk radio is violence-inciting "hate speech"? Meanwhile, earlier this month, Clinton took the stage with Santorum and Brownback to decry indecency in pop culture and call for a federal study of its effect on children. The issue is even thorny for Bush, who knows his debt to social conservatives but told C-SPAN in January that parents are "the first line of responsibility. They put an off button [on] the TV for a reason."

Granted, conservatives and liberals tend to be offended by different things. Conservatives tend to see a culture glorifying promiscuity and drug use. Liberals get more concerned about violence and degradation of women. The right sees the machinations of amoral Hollywood. The left sees soulless megabusinesses dropping their standards to court the coveted 18- to 34-year-old male demographic. "Obviously, you have an incentive to program material that will appeal directly to that market," says Michael Copps, a Democratic FCC commissioner, who argues that the rise of indecency and megamergers are related. "This whole issue of media consolidation goes not only to the quality of entertainment that we get but the very core of civic dialogue and the collective decisions we make as a democracy." But members of both camps are concerned about a media market in which whatever sells goes.

James Steyer, a law professor at Stanford University, describes himself as "a progressive parent who lives in San Francisco." That didn't stop him from founding in 2003 Common Sense Media, which runs a website that rates TV shows, video games, music, books and websites for age appropriateness. "I'm no right-winger or religious ideologue," he says. "This is a nonpartisan issue." Kathleen Richardson of Des Moines, Iowa, is executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council and the mother of three kids, 12, 16 and 18. "Here I'm promoting free speech and the values of the First Amendment professionally," she says, "and yet it drives me crazy that my kids are swimming around in this pop culture that is becoming a sort of sewer."

But it's not only politicians and activists who experience cognitive dissonance on indecency--so do everyday citizens. They want protection from smut yet don't use the V chip. They talk about competing with pop culture to parent their children yet give kids TVs and computers in their bedrooms. They rail against sex and violence in entertainment, yet--as a group, anyway--reward it and punish the alternatives. The most wholesome new network show of last fall was CBS's Clubhouse, a sweet drama about a teenage bat boy for a baseball team, executive-produced by Mel (The Passion of the Christ) Gibson. It was canceled by November. Desperate Housewives is still going strong.

In an exclusive TIME poll, more than half the respondents say there's too much violence, profanity and sex on TV, but most say they aren't personally offended by it and don't want that content banned. Slightly more than half believe the FCC should be stricter, but 66% say it overreacted to Janet Jackson. Yet what may seem like confusion--or just hypocrisy--may also be something too often missing from the indecency debate: subtlety.

When you talk to people about what bothers them in pop culture--if anything does--they tend not to talk about discrete, FCC-finable offenses. They talk about video games, ads, innuendos, magazine covers--things that the FCC doesn't police or that are so nebulous and environmental as to be unpoliceable in a free society. They don't want absolute rules. They want boundaries: they just want to know where the cultural deep end and the kiddie pool are.

In the classic definition, a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. Today some people feel mugged by pop culture. It's not just watching a football game and getting flashed by a singer's breast. It's the unwanted porn e-mail or the hamburger commercial with a woman lasciviously riding a mechanical bull. It's watching a sports program with your young child and hearing the host blurt, "A______!" Tim Tutt, a single, third-grade teacher in Des Moines, calls himself "a liberal, anticensorship person." But he was furious when he visited a website for his students and up popped an ad with a sexy blond. "Boy, did I lose control of the class for a moment," he says. "Then I felt this conservative rage within me--'Why was that necessary?'" People care, in other words, about context as well as content.

WHO SETS THE STANDARD?

In indecency then, context is king. The PTC and the FCC say it was not indecent to air Saving Private Ryan on network TV--even though children might be watching during prime time--because of the context: soldiers swear in war. But of course, mobsters swear too. So could The Sopranos, just as critically praised, air on NBC? Can only good guys drop the F bomb? Indecency activists often cite the dictum of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart on obscenity: "I know it when I see it." But who knows indecency, and what do they see?

Consider the Feb. 17 episode of CSI. A form complaint letter available at the PTC website describes the episode, and it's icky stuff. The plot is about infantilism, a sexual fetish that involves adults wearing diapers and suckling at women's breasts. But the letter includes a curious argument: "COMPLAINANT urges the Commission to take notice of the high ratings for this episode of CSI ratings [sic]--reportedly viewed in 30.72 million households. Given its relatively early broadcast time [9 p.m. E.T.], it was without question viewed by millions of children."

That's one way of interpreting the number. Here's another: more than 30 million people watched the Feb. 17 episode of CSI, a show that has been on the air since 2000. It is probably the most gruesome, explicit drama on broadcast TV--and it is the single most popular. Did all those people tune in by accident? When the greatest plurality of viewers choose to watch a show they know to be graphic, can that show be beyond the pale? Or does COMPLAINANT simply not like where the pale is nowadays?

Robert Acosta, a police officer from Florida who worries about protecting his 6-year-old son from dirty TV, expresses that sentiment plaintively: "We have to go back to the '50s. The world is going crazy. The '50s was a great time." Perhaps decency advocates mourn not only the moral standards of the '50s but also the social consensus. Opinion about today's balkanized media is as fragmented as their audience. So who should set the standard? Parents of kids under 18? (They make up only 36% of U.S. households.) Senior citizens? That gay guy with the nipple ring?

In reality, they each do, in their own home. And it's likely to stay that way, however the current skirmishes play out, as media evolve and technology advances beyond attempts to corral it. Digital video recorders like TiVo, for instance, may make the concept of family hour moot, since their users can watch programs whenever they want. In the meantime, it wouldn't hurt for decency proponents to recognize that different people define "values" differently, for media companies to take more seriously the genuine concerns of their customers who feel ambushed by their products and for all of us to recognize that making choices is a right for others and a responsibility for ourselves. There's a word for that kind of attitude, right? Oh, yeah: decent. --Reported by Timothy J. Burger, Massimo Calabresi and Eric Roston/Washington; Rita Healy/Denver; Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles; Siobhan Morrissey/Miami; and Betsy Rubiner/Des Moines

With reporting by Reported by Timothy J. Burger, Massimo Calabresi, Eric Roston/Washington, Rita Healy/Denver, Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles, Siobhan Morrissey/Miami, Betsy Rubiner/Des Moines