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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The indecency war is ready to heat up -- and Tony Soprano, Jon Stewart and the "South Park" kids better watch their mouths.
Aug 30, 2005 | A 2003 episode of the short-lived Fox comedy "Keen Eddie" features a woman described as a "filthy slut" who is hired to "extract" semen from a prize thoroughbred. "That's not natural," the prostitute protests. "Think of it as science," says the man offering to pay. Though the episode featured no actual extraction -- off-camera the woman lifts her shirt and the horse suddenly drops dead -- some Americans complained, finding the scene inappropriate for prime-time television.
The Federal Communications Commission disagreed. In the majority opinion, the commission decided the sequence was not intended to "pander, shock, or titillate." The decision, however, was not unanimous. Commissioner Kevin J. Martin, whom President Bush has since appointed FCC chairman, thought Fox stations should be fined. "Despite my colleagues' assurance that there appeared to be a safe distance between the prostitute and the horse, I remain uncomfortable," Martin wrote at the time.
Though Martin lost the battle over horse extraction, he is now poised to win the broader indecency war. During the long hot summer in Washington, he has been quietly meeting with religious activists and industry leaders to organize a push for new standards for broadcast, cable and satellite television. At the same time, Martin's allies in the Senate have been considering new laws that could increase broadcast indecency fines, break up cable TV offerings to allow parents to cut off racy channels, and -- most controversially -- give the FCC the power to fine basic cable programs, like MTV's "Real World" and Comedy Central's "Daily Show," for crude and lewd content.
"On the surface, it may look like ... we are in a holding pattern," a Senate Commerce Committee staffer tells Salon. "But there have been lots of meetings on a staff level as well as meetings with interest groups and with industry."
Privately, industry leaders are quaking in their Prada loafers. The water cooler may no longer buzz over Janet Jackson's Super Bowl halftime teat or Bono's expletive-laden Golden Globe speech, but executives still see the coming fight to sanitize television of the crude, the pixelated and the bleepable as an assault on their bottom line. "Everybody should be frightened by the notion that this process could be hijacked by a very few people," says Jim Dyke, a Republican who now leads TV Watch, a group founded by Viacom (CBS, MTV, Comedy Central), General Electric (NBC, Bravo) and News Corp. (Fox) to argue against new regulation. "They are trying to make decisions about what our children can see."
In the coming weeks, observers expect Martin to act upon between 30 and 50 outstanding indecency complaints, the first step in clearing a backlog of hundreds of allegedly inappropriate broadcasts on television and radio. He has promised to remake the indecency process, speeding FCC responses and establishing a clearer precedent of what constitutes indecent programming. "The fact that we have not had any fines this year really just means we are in the eye of the hurricane," says one former FCC official, who has been following the situation. The storm first hit in 2004, when the FCC, under then-chairman Michael Powell, proposed $3.7 million in fines, more than twice as much as all the fines issued in the previous decade.
In the meantime, Martin, a former White House aide to President Bush, has been meeting privately with evangelical activists to assure them of his commitment to change the television landscape. The government does not regulate shows distributed over cable or satellite television for indecency. Similarly, there are no indecency limits on the content of satellite radio, where shock-jock Howard Stern sought refuge and will begin broadcasting next year. But in one session this summer, Martin told activists that he is privately reaching out to industry leaders to address racy content on basic cable and satellite television, says Rick Schatz, the president of the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families, a Christian ministry. "He said the free rein of cable and satellite and satellite radio is not acceptable," says Schatz, who sat in on the meeting. "He's committed to seeing something is done during his tenure."
Martin has asked media companies to offer a new "family-friendly" tier of cable programming, a package that would likely exclude channels like MTV and Spike TV. "If cable and satellite operators continue to refuse to offer parents more tools, basic indecency and profanity restrictions may be a viable alternative," he said during a House hearing in February 2004. New government restrictions would require an act of Congress.
But Martin seems to have found an ally in the Senate, where Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, recently became the chairman of the Commerce Committee. "We put restrictions on over-the-air signals," Stevens said of network broadcasts in March. "I think we can put restrictions on cable itself." His staff has been reviewing new regulatory options, looking for ideas that would survive a court challenge on First Amendment grounds. Though no schedule has been put forward, several people following the issue expect to see hearings scheduled later this fall.
