The Decency Police

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

CHRIS MUELLER / REDUX

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The FCC also has the power to makes regulatory decisions--from mergers to ownership rules--worth billions to media companies. That alone can be powerful incentive to self-censor. One proposal by Senator Stevens--and a longtime goal of the PTC's--is to make cable companies offer subscribers a bundle of channels rated according to their content. They could either buy channels separately or choose only a family-friendly "tier" of channels. That would be a boon for viewers who don't want to subsidize MTV's spring-break parties, but media companies claim it would raise prices and drive smaller channels out of business.

In any event, it would roil a very profitable business. And so last week Disney broke ranks with its media brethren and backed FCC regulation of cable--as an alternative to Congress imposing à la carte offerings. (Disney's cable holdings include tamer channels like ABC Family and The Disney Channel, but its ESPN often lets profanities fly.) Some broadcast executives, meanwhile, have called for decency control over cable so that they could better compete with cable channels. The greatest hope for those who want to extend the state's power over media may be in the fact that most executives would rather lose freedom than money.

SO WHAT'S FILTH?

Given the postelection focus on "moral values," indecency has been even more oversimplified as a red-state-vs.-blue-state issue. But it doesn't break neatly along Republican and Democrat lines. It is one of the few issues capable of uniting, on one side, Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern, and on the other, New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. If the FCC is strengthened, Limbaugh has argued, what happens when a future Democratic Administration decides that conservative talk radio is violence-inciting "hate speech"? Meanwhile, earlier this month, Clinton took the stage with Santorum and Brownback to decry indecency in pop culture and call for a federal study of its effect on children. The issue is even thorny for Bush, who knows his debt to social conservatives but told C-SPAN in January that parents are "the first line of responsibility. They put an off button [on] the TV for a reason."

Granted, conservatives and liberals tend to be offended by different things. Conservatives tend to see a culture glorifying promiscuity and drug use. Liberals get more concerned about violence and degradation of women. The right sees the machinations of amoral Hollywood. The left sees soulless megabusinesses dropping their standards to court the coveted 18- to 34-year-old male demographic. "Obviously, you have an incentive to program material that will appeal directly to that market," says Michael Copps, a Democratic FCC commissioner, who argues that the rise of indecency and megamergers are related. "This whole issue of media consolidation goes not only to the quality of entertainment that we get but the very core of civic dialogue and the collective decisions we make as a democracy." But members of both camps are concerned about a media market in which whatever sells goes.