The Decency Police

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

CHRIS MUELLER / REDUX

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The larger question is, Do the PTC and other decency campaigners simply want the freedom to find safe zones for their kids? Or do they want to bring you into the safe zone too--if necessary, by cleaning up shows that you have chosen to watch? The slogan that greets visitors to the PTC's website is "Because our children are watching." But for some decency advocates, the problem is also that someone else's children are watching--it's the problem, which both liberal and conservative parents experience, of being exposed to "secondhand smut." Jack Thompson is a Coral Gables, Fla., attorney who filed a series of complaints against Stern that resulted in a $495,000 fine against Clear Channel Communications. A decency hard-liner--he thinks shock jock Stern should be in jail--Thompson doesn't buy the argument that parents should just turn off the TV or radio. "It isn't necessarily what we keep our kids from," he says, "but our inability to keep other kids from certain material, who then share it with our kids in school and elsewhere. It's like dumping toxic waste in a playground."

BRINGING IN THE LAW

There is no shortage of volunteers to legislate decency. A bill that overwhelmingly passed in the House would increase indecency fines to $500,000 (from $32,500 for stations and $11,000 for individual performers). A Senate bill introduced last week by John D. Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, and Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, also ups the ante to $500,000, plus would bring cable and satellite under FCC purview, though vaguely. Yet most frightening to media executives are the warnings of Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska and the powerful chairman of the Commerce Committee, that he may push his own legislation to curb cable. "Eighty-five percent of the people watching televisions today are watching through cable, but they think they're watching local TV," he says. "They have to have some protection."

If the laws pass, the FCC's Martin is likely to be aggressive with them. In the past, he criticized some decisions during Powell's tenure as too lenient--such as not fining Fox for the horse-prostitute liaison on Keen Eddie--and called for fines not only to be stiffer but also to be assessed "per utterance," not per incident (one unbleeped Dave Chappelle routine, and you're in the poorhouse). He also wants to restore the "family hour" to prime time. Decency advocates are big fans. "He can send the signal that the agency has to get serious," says Bozell. And--Nip/Tuck viewers, take heed--he has spoken favorably about regulating cable and satellite to "level the playing field."

Is that possible? The reason the government can regulate broadcast TV and radio at all is that it owns the air. The FCC licenses frequencies on the airwaves, a public resource. In return, broadcasters must meet public-service requirements and obey decency rules, which ban "language or material that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory activities or organs." That's why the FCC can police four-letter words on NBC but not in a movie or this magazine. (Pornography is different, because the law distinguishes "obscenity" from "indecency.")