The Decency Police

WATCHDOG: Bozell says his group has doubled its size in seven years

CHRIS MUELLER / REDUX

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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.