[Mb-hair] NYTimes.com Article: Frank Rich: The Great Indecency Hoax

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Frank Rich: The Great Indecency Hoax

November 28, 2004
 


 

OH, the poor, suffering little children. 

If we are to believe the outcry of the past two weeks,
America's youth have been defiled en masse - again. This
time the dirty deed was done by the actress Nicollette
Sheridan, who dropped her towel in the cheesy promotional
spot for the runaway hit "Desperate Housewives" that kicked
off "Monday Night Football" on ABC. "I wonder if Walt
Disney would be proud," said Michael Powell, the Federal
Communications Commission chairman who increasingly
fashions himself a commissar of all things cultural, from
nipple rings to "Son of Flubber." 

It's beginning to look a lot like "Groundhog Day." Ever
since 22 percent of the country's voters said on Nov. 2
that they cared most about "moral values," opportunistic
ayatollahs on the right have been working overtime to
inflate this nonmandate into a landslide by ginning up
cultural controversies that might induce censorship by a
compliant F.C.C. and, failing that, self-censorship by TV
networks. Seizing on a single overhyped poll result, they
exaggerate their clout, hoping to grab power over the
culture. 

The mainstream press, itself in love with the "moral
values" story line and traumatized by the visual
exaggerations of the red-blue map, is too cowed to
challenge the likes of the American Family Association. So
are politicians of both parties. It took a British
publication, The Economist, to point out that the
percentage of American voters citing moral and ethical
values as their prime concern is actually down from 2000
(35 percent) and 1996 (40 percent). 

To see how the hucksters of the right work their scam,
there could be no more illustrative example than the
"Monday Night Football" episode in which Ms. Sheridan
leaped into the arms of the Philadelphia Eagles wide
receiver Terrell Owens in order to give the declining
weekly game (viewership is down 3 percent from 2003) a shot
of Viagra. From the get-go, it was a manufactured scandal,
as over-the-top as a dinner theater production of "The
Crucible." 

Rush Limbaugh, taking a break from the legal deliberations
of his drug rap and third divorce, set the hysterical tone.
"I was stunned!" he told his listeners. "I literally could
not believe what I had seen. ... At various places on the
Net you can see the video of this, and she's buck naked,
folks. I mean when they dropped the towel she's naked. You
see enough of her back and rear end to know that she was
naked. There's no frontal nudity in the thing, but I mean
you don't need that. ...I mean, there are some guys with
their kids that sit down to watch 'Monday Night Football.'
" 

Yes, there are - some, anyway - but you wonder how many of
them were as upset as Mr. Limbaugh, whose imagination led
him to mistake a lower back for a rear end. (He also said
that the Sheridan-Owens encounter reminded him of the Kobe
Bryant case; let's not even go there.) The evidence
suggests that Mr. Limbaugh's prurient mind is the
exception, not the rule. Though seen nationwide, and as
early as 6 p.m. on the West Coast, the spot initially
caused so little stir that the next morning only two
newspapers in the country, both in Philadelphia, reported
on it. ABC's switchboards were not swamped by shocked
viewers on Monday night. A spokesman for ABC Sports told
The Philadelphia Inquirer that he hadn't received a single
phone call or e-mail in the immediate aftermath of the
broadcast. 

Even the stunned Mr. Limbaugh, curiously enough, didn't get
around to mounting his own diatribe until Wednesday. Mr.
Owens's agent, David Joseph, says that the flood of
complaints at his office and Mr. Owens's Web site also
didn't start until more than 24 hours after the incident -
late Tuesday and early Wednesday. Were any of these
complainants actual victims (or even viewers) of "Monday
Night Football" or were they just a mob assembled after the
fact by "family" groups, emboldened by their triumph in
smiting "Saving Private Ryan" from 66 ABC stations the week
before? Though the F.C.C. said on Wednesday that it had
received 50,000 complaints about the N.F.L. affair, it
couldn't determine how many of them were duplicates - the
kind generated by e-mail campaigns run by political
organizations posting form letters ready to be clicked into
cyberspace ad infinitum by anyone who has an index finger
and two seconds of idle time. 

Like the Janet Jackson video before it, the new N.F.L. sex
tape was now being rebroadcast around the clock so we could
revel incessantly in the shock of it all. "People were so
outraged they had to see it 10 times," joked Aaron Brown of
CNN, which was no slacker in filling that need in the
marketplace. And yet when I spoke to an F.C.C. enforcement
spokesman after more than two days of such replays, the
agency had not yet received a single complaint about the
spot's constant recycling on other TV shows, among them the
highly rated talk show "The View," where Ms. Sheridan's
bare back had been merrily paraded at the child-friendly
hour of 11 a.m. 

The hypocrisy embedded in this tale is becoming a national
running gag. As in the Super Bowl brouhaha, in which the
N.F.L. maintained it had no idea that MTV might produce a
racy halftime show, the league has denied any prior inkling
of the salaciousness on tap this time - even though the
spot featured the actress playing the sluttiest character
in prime time's most libidinous series and was shot with
the full permission of one of the league's teams in its own
locker room. Again as in the Jackson case, we are also
asked to believe that pro football is what Pat Buchanan
calls "the family entertainment, the family sports show"
rather than what it actually is: a Boschian jamboree of
bumping-and-grinding cheerleaders, erectile-dysfunction
pageantry and, as Don Imus puts it, "wife-beating drug
addicts slamming the hell out of each other" on the field. 

But there's another, more insidious game being played as
well. The F.C.C. and the family values crusaders alike are
cooking their numbers. The first empirical evidence was
provided this month by Jeff Jarvis, a former TV Guide
critic turned blogger. He had the ingenious idea of filing
a Freedom of Information Act request to see the actual
viewer complaints that drove the F.C.C. to threaten Fox and
its affiliates with the largest indecency fine to date -
$1.2 million for the sins of a now-defunct reality program
called "Married by America." Though the F.C.C. had cited
159 public complaints in its legal case against Fox, the
documents obtained by Mr. Jarvis showed that there were
actually only 90 complaints, written by 23 individuals. Of
those 23, all but 2 were identical repetitions of a form
letter posted by the Parents Television Council. In other
words, the total of actual, discrete complaints about
"Married by America" was 3. 

Such letter-writing factories as the American Family
Association's OneMillionMoms.com also exaggerate their
clout in intimidating advertisers. They brag, for instance,
that the retail chain Lowe's dropped its commercials on
"Desperate Housewives" in response to their protests. But
Lowe's was not an advertiser on the show; the advertiser
who actually bought the commercial was Whirlpool, which
plugged Lowe's as a retail outlet for its products under a
co-branding arrangement. Another advertiser that the
family-values mafia takes credit for chasing away, Tyson
Foods, had only bought in for one episode of "Desperate
Housewives" in the first place. It had long since been
replaced by such Fortune 500 advertisers as Ford and
McDonald's, each clamoring to pay three times as much for a
30-second spot ($450,000) as those early advertisers who
bought time before the show had its debut and became an
instant smash. 

But perhaps the most revealing barometer of the real state
of play in American culture in 2004 is "Desperate
Housewives" itself. Conceived by Marc Cherry, who is
described by Newsweek as a "somewhat conservative, gay
Republican," it is a campy, well-made soap opera presenting
suburban American family life as a fugue of dysfunction,
malice and sex. It's not for nothing that its characters
are seen running off to Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder
retrospectives or that some of the episodes are named after
Stephen Sondheim songs like "Who's That Woman?" and "Pretty
Little Picture." 

The children of Mr. Cherry's Wisteria Lane can be as
poisonous as that small-town brat in Hitchcock's "Shadow of
a Doubt": one preadolescent girl is an extortionist and one
teenage daughter all but pimps for her divorced mother. The
career-driven husbands are as soulless as the office rats
of Wilder's "Apartment," and their wives are, yes, as
desperate as those in the Manhattan high-rises of
Sondheim's "Company." Whatever else is to be said about
"Desperate Housewives" - and I haven't missed an episode -
it is not to be confused with the kind of entertainment
that the Traditional Values Coalition wants to impose on
the airwaves. It not only emulates HBO Sunday night hits
like "Sex and the City" and "Six Feet Under" in its cheeky,
sardonic tone but brushes right up against them in language
and action. 

In one recent show the most oversexed character on screen,
a 17-year-old jock having an affair with a married woman,
is revealed to be a member of his high school's "abstinence
club." (Surely it was a coincidence that this revelation
butted right up against a commercial for Ortho Tri-Cyclen,
a prescription contraceptive.) In another, a wife
collapsing under the burden of stay-at-home motherhood
slugs her spouse when he contemplates not using a condom.
Then there was the dinner party where another of the wives
tries to humiliate her husband by telling the assembled
that he "cries after he ejaculates." 

"Desperate Housewives" is hardly a blue-state phenomenon. A
hit everywhere, it is even a bigger hit in Oklahoma City
than it is in Los Angeles, bigger in Kansas City than it is
in New York. All those public moralists who wail about all
the kids watching Ms. Sheridan on "Monday Night Football"
would probably have apoplexy if they actually watched what
Ms. Sheridan was up to in her own series - and then looked
closely at its Nielsen numbers. Though children ages 2 to
11 make up a small percentage of the audience of either
show, there are actually more in that age group tuning into
Mr. Cherry's marital brawls (870,000) than into the
N.F.L.'s fisticuffs (540,000). "Desperate Housewives" also
ranks No. 5 among all prime-time shows for ages 12-17.
("Monday Night Football" is No. 18.) This may explain in
part why its current advertisers include products like
Fisher-Price toys, the DVD of "Elf" and the forthcoming Tim
Allen holiday vehicle, "Christmas With the Kranks." 

Those who cherish the First Amendment can only hope that
the Traditional Values Coalition, OneMillionMoms.com,
OneMillionDads .com and all the rest send every e-mail they
can to the F.C.C. demanding punitive action against the
stations that broadcast "Desperate Housewives." A "moral
values" crusade that stands between a TV show this popular
and its audience will quickly learn the limits of its power
in a country where entertainment is god. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/arts/28rich.html?ex=1102410575&ei=1&en=0a4f70668c864d7f


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