Sex Still Sells

CHRISTIANITY TODAY/March 3, 1989

More skin means higher ratings for television networks.

Nearly three decades ago, Newton Minow, then chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), surveyed the landscape of television and radio broadcasting in America and pronounced it a “vast wasteland of formulas and boredom.”

If the industry in Minow’s era was an adolescent facing an identity crisis, traditional TV and radio in 1989 could be said to be undergoing a midlife crisis. Media observers generally believe that the industry—beset by rapid changes in technology and fierce competition from newcomers—is in a state of tremendous flux.

By most accounts, the industry’s future will be marked by a continuing increase in the number of choices for viewers and listeners, new technology in the way broadcast signals are delivered to homes, and less government regulation of program content. Amid all this are growing concerns about the decency of television fare.

Sexy Trend

Media watchdog agencies, such as Morality in Media and the American Family Association (AFA), have voiced concern about instances in which network television seems to be pushing the limits of good taste. Critics cite numerous incidents of vulgarity, partial nudity, excessive violence, and “raw adult language” on such shows as NBC’s “L.A. Law” and “Miami Vice,” and ABC’s “thirtysomething” as evidence of a decline in broadcast standards. Some have also protested the increased commercialism of children’s television, alleging that dozens of Saturday morning shows appear to be little more than 30-minute commercials for toys.

“We’re advising people to write the advertisers and tell them they won’t be buying any more of their products,” says Evelyn Dukovic, executive vice-president of New York-based Morality in Media, an agency that promotes the vigorous enforcement of antiobscenity laws. “The networks just don’t seem to understand any other language.”

Dying Monopoly

Many observers draw a link between the networks’ declining standards and the growing competition they are facing. With the increasing influence of public broadcasting, and the advent of cable and videocassette recorders, the major networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS) have lost the virtual broadcast monopoly they once enjoyed. Competition, including some from new ad hoc networks of independent stations—such as upstart Fox Broadcasting—have eroded the major networks’ audience share and, consequently, their advertising revenue.

Plummeting revenues have spawned financial austerity measures, including the wholesale closing of foreign news bureaus. Among the major networks, sometimes called the “Big Three,” several thousand jobs have been eliminated in recent years. One area upon which this has made an impact is that of broadcast standards and practices.

Traditionally networks have attempted to censor themselves. But today, among the Big Three, only ABC still has an official broadcast-standards department, staffed by 40 censors. Both CBS and NBC have eliminated their standards departments, turning censorship responsibilities over to the executives in charge of each program. Observers estimate that throughout the industry, only about half of the more than 200 network censors that plied their trade in the mid-1970s remain.

Worst Offender?

One of the programs most roundly criticized because of its sex scenes was the dramatic NBC miniseries “Favorite Son,” which aired last fall. According to Morality in Media, the scenes “more than suggested explicit sado-masochism.”

Alan Gerson, NBC vice-president of program marketing and administration, maintains, however, that this criticism needs context. “This complaint focuses on four or five minutes out of a six-hour miniseries,” he said. “This was a drama with adult themes, advertised as such, and aired in what is generally considered adult time blocks. No one could have tuned in accidentally thinking it was going to be a children’s show.”

Gerson said his network’s objective “is to provide a program service that will offer the widest range of acceptable programming to the largest audience possible.” He dismissed the view that competition from cable TV—which is under no government regulations and can telecast uncut, sexually explicit programming—is pushing the networks to greater titillation of viewers. “We invented broadcast standards,” he said, “and we will always be much more conservative than cable.”

However, Janice Gretemeyer, director of press relations for ABC, concedes that increased competition has influenced broadcast standards. “The viewer expectancy has been modified by all the TV choices they have,” she said. “That doesn’t mean that we’ll ever see the networks pandering to the same tastes as cable, but we do have to recognize that people just expect to see more on TV nowadays.”

That assumption angers Alan Wildmon of the AFA, which encourages Christians to oppose obscenity through advertiser boycotts. “The more skin they show, the higher the ratings,” laments Wildmon, brother of AFA founder Donald Wildmon. “The higher the ratings, the higher the profit. The almighty dollar is the bottom line for the networks.”

Deregulation Debate

Meanwhile, in the nation’s capital, the conflict over broadcast standards is focused on the issue of deregulation. Specifically, the debate is over the constitutionality of a law passed by Congress last fall banning “indecency” from the public airwaves 24 hours a day. The law, named the “Helms Bill” for U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), requires the FCC to levy fines against—or even revoke the licenses of—offending broadcasters.

The law’s opponents, which include the major networks, succeeded early this year in convincing the courts to stay the scheduled January 27 execution date of the Helms Bill until the courts decide whether it abridges broadcasters’ First Amendment rights.

At the eye of the storm is a somewhat hazy ten-year-old Supreme Court definition of indecency that prohibits owners of America’s 1,342 TV stations and 10,244 radio stations from broadcasting “pictures or words of a sexual or excretory nature that are patently offensive.”

The recently departed Reagan administration moved in the direction of stricter enforcement of obscenity laws. But it also favored deregulating the airwaves. One result of this latter emphasis was a hesitancy on the part of the FCC to respond to complaints of indecent programming. In fact, it ruled on only three of the hundreds of complaints it received, including the case of a Kansas City TV station that aired (during prime time) an uncut version of the film Private Lessons, which included fleeting scenes of frontal nudity.

The complaint was filed by a regional director of the AFA. It resulted in the FCC’s maximum fine of $2,000, a mere “slap on the wrist,” according to the AFA’s Wildmon. “We had to force the FCC to act on that complaint,” he said. “We’ve sent them literally hundreds of videotaped incidents of indecency, and they’re sitting on some shelf somewhere collecting dust.”

If the Helms law is upheld, the FCC, though loathe to do it, will enforce the policy “to the fullest extent of the law,” according to chairman Dennis Patrick. “It will mean a retrenchment of the last eight years of deregulation,” said Patrick. “But Congress seems intent on regulating the content of programming, especially public service and children’s programming.”

In the end, technology might provide a solution to the dilemma among those who want both high broadcast standards and deregulation. According to Dennis McDougal, who covers the broadcast industry for the Los Angeles Times, low-cost consumer satellite dishes may be just around the corner. McDougal said the satellite dish could pose a threat to traditional broadcasters in the 1990s similar to the threat posed by the VCR in the 1980s. He foresees a day when “people will subscribe to TV and radio services like they do to magazines, making mass-audience broadcasting and the potential for accidentally offending public taste a moot question.”

By Brian Bird.

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