The Decency Police

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

CHRIS MUELLER / REDUX

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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.