The Paradox of the Indecency Campaign

Frank Rich, International Herald Tribune
February 25, 2005.

The total box office for all five best-picture nominees on the Oscars on Sunday night is so small that their collective niche in America's cultural marketplace falls somewhere between square dancing and non-Grisham fiction. But if this year's Oscars are worthless as a barometer of the broad state of American pop culture, there's much to learn from the hype spun by ABC and the motion picture academy to seduce people to watch even if they can't distinguish Clive Owen from Catalina Sandino Moreno. The selling of the Oscar show is the latest indicator of the most telling disconnect in U.S. politics: in the post-Janet Jackson era, "indecency" is gaining in popularity in direct proportion to Washington's campaign to shut indecency down.
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Hollywood can read the numbers. Once the feds vowed to smite future "wardrobe malfunctions," the customers started bolting the annual TV franchises where those malfunctions and their verbal counterparts are apt to occur. An award show sanitized of vulgarity and encased in the prophylactic of tape delay is an oxymoron. And so the Golden Globes lost 40 percent of its audience in January on NBC, the Grammys lost 28 percent of its audience this month on CBS.
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This is why the people bringing you the Oscars have done everything possible to imply that the show will be indecent. The academy hired as its host Chris Rock, a three-time MTV Music Video Awards M.C. Rock ran around giving cheeky interviews making the outrageous charge that the Oscars might have a gay following.
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Matt Drudge took the bait and assailed the comedian for indecency. Rock was soiling "the classiest night in Hollywood," he said on Fox News, by taking "a lewd route to the gutter." The motion picture academy's marketers know a lewd route is the yellow brick road to Nielsen nirvana. Gilbert Cates, the Oscars producer, had already been putting out the message that he opposed the show's tape delay as "dangerous to society." The academy's executive director, Bruce Davis, elaborated to Lola Ogunnaike of The New York Times: "I like to hear that people are nervous because that means you're more likely to watch." Last Sunday, Rock was billed by Ed Bradley on "60 Minutes" as a "nontraditional host" whose "comedy is still as profane and uncut as ever."
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It's all a hoax, of course. ABC has merely shortened last year's seven-second tape delay to five seconds, and viewers may have reason to complain when they learn that any profane comedy or liberated cleavage will be seen only by the swells at the Kodak Theater.
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The signs are everywhere that the indecency campaign is failing anyway in the months since "moral values" supposedly became the unofficial law of the land. To see how much so, forget about the liberal Hollywood of Oscar night and examine instead the porn peddlers of the right.
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Adelphia, a cable giant known for its refusal to traffic in erotica, decided to change its image radically now that its moralistic founder and former CEO, John Rigas, has been convicted of looting the company. Shortly after President George W. Bush's inauguration, Adelphia acknowledged that it is offering XXX, the most hard-core porn, to some subscribers - a cable first, outdoing even the XX porn on Murdoch's DirecTV in explicitness. "The more X's, the more popular," an Adelphia spokeswoman told The Los Angeles Times.
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As Jake Tapper reported on ABC News, Adelphia is a big Republican contributor. Its beneficiaries include Rick Santorum, the Republican senator from Pennsylvania who has likened homosexuality to "man on dog" sex. Sift through the Center for Responsive Politics's campaign contribution site, and you will also find that Fred Upton, the Republican point man in the Congressional indecency crusade, is one of the many in his party (Bush among them) raking in contributions from Comcast or its executives. Comcast subscribers are awash in porn.
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Cheering Upton on is the Parents Television Council, the e-mail factory that Mediaweek magazine credits with as much as 99.9 percent of all indecency complaints to the FCC in 2004. It is also quite a little fount of salacious entertainment in its own right. On its Web site, the organization's "entertainment analysts" compile a list of naughty words used on television and invite visitors to "Watch the Worst TV Clip of the Week." An archive of past clips - helpfully labeled individually by sin ("gratuitous teen sex," "necrophilia") - is there for your pleasure, with no requirement for the credit card number or membership fee that porn Internet sites use as a roadblock for children.
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Even if it barely slows the entertainment industry juggernaut, the indecency campaign inflicts collateral damage elsewhere - whether casting a chill over broadcast news or crippling public broadcasting by inducing it to censor even the language of American troops in a "Frontline" documentary about Iraq. The Parents Television Council may purport to complain about "The Simpsons," which last Sunday presented an episode both sympathetic to same-sex marriage and skeptical of a Bible-thumping minister. But that's a game; this organization knows full well it can't lay a finger on Fox or its well-connected proprietor, Murdoch. The same anti-indecency forces, however, can and did set the stage for the new secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, to go gunning for a far milder evocation of same-sex parents in the children's show "Postcards From Buster" on PBS.
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Spellings will figure out ways to discriminate against real-life lesbian moms in other departmental policies that have nothing to do with entertainment. And she's not the only administration official empowered by the decency crusaders to apply censorship to public policy well removed from the TV screen. The Washington Post reported that the Department of Health and Human Services had instructed the presenters of a federally funded conference on suicide prevention this month to remove the words "gay," "lesbian," "bisexual" and "transgender" from the name of a talk heretofore titled "Suicide Prevention Among Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender Individuals," thereby rendering it invisible and useless.
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At least Bush is now on tape saying he won't "kick gays." He leaves that to surrogates. It's gay people and teenagers being denied potentially life-saving sex education who ultimately are the real victims of the larger agenda of the decency crusaders, which is not to clean up show business, a doomed mission, but to realize the more attainable goal of enlisting the government to marginalize and punish those who don't adhere to their "moral values." For its part, show business will have no problem fending for itself.