The Cedar Lounge Revolution

I may not have mentioned On the Media, from National Public Radio, but it provides an excellent look at the US (and international) media available as a podcast here.

One of the most useful aspects of it is the transcript of every show. As an aside it’s intriguing to see how little text fits a ten minute slot. Anyhow, recent editions have considered reports on evangelical Christians in the U.S. (making the chastening point that the numbers estimated for them may be grossly inflated), media in Zimbabwe and the Chinese government PR for the Olympic Games.

I’m really coming to the conclusion that for all it’s faults, the NPR segment of the US media, is easily the equal of the more feted BBC. And on that note can I recommend the entertaining, but fundamentally serious, ‘It’s all Politics’ and the really quite remarkable ‘This American Life” which as might be expected addresses through interview slices of US life (and in particular their show from 3/3/08 about a room in the New York City Board of Education building which is set aside of teachers who have been suspended for various infractions - a strangely compelling tale).

Anyhow, On The Media had a fine piece in their last edition about profanity. Remembering George Carlin who died recently it discussed how there remain words that still can’t be discussed on radio, or television. Or, and this is an important proviso, not on all television.

George Carlin had an act that went as follows…

There are 400,000 words in the English language and there are seven of ‘em you can’t say on television. What a ratio that is - 399,993 to 7.

They must really be bad.

They’d have to be outrageous to be separated from a group that large. All of you over here, you seven -

- bad words!

No bad words - bad thoughts, bad intentions, and words.

You know the seven [words], don’t you, that you can’t say on television?

As On The Media noted these were ‘A word for excretion, for urination, for having sex, for breasts… and three words so radioactive we can’t even describe them’. I like that term ‘radioactive’, it suggests that it is the words themselves that have power rather than that power being attributed to them by others.

Or as Carlin put it…

“Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits. Those are the heavy seven. Those are the ones that’ll infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war.”

More recently, as Glenn Carvin, TV critic for the Miami Herald noted on NPR, Bono was slapped on the wrist for the following :

[CLIP]

BONO: That’s really, really [BLEEP]‘in brilliant. And -

[LAUGHTER]

- really, really great.

[LAUGHTER]

GLENN GARVIN: The FCC got complaints over Bono’s use of the F word, which they very curiously decided was not something they could penalize because he used the word as an adverb -

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]

GLENN GARVIN: - rather than as a noun or a verb.

There’s more than one of us who might have used that excuse, had we known it, in the past.

But there are oddities…

GLENN GARVIN: The show Deadwood on HBO used the F word so often that a website actually began counting them and working out what it called the FPM.

That’s F words per minute. In over three seasons it averaged 1.56 F words per minute, which is a pretty impressive total, really.

The paradox being that as subscription cable has an increasing number of television programmes that feature the vernacular, the number of complaints to the FCC has increased exponentially, as Garvin relates:

There were 14,000 complaints to the FCC in 2002. In 2003 it was up to 170,000. And the FCC is now so far behind on logging these complaints that we only have statistics available through the first half of 2006, but for just the first six months of 2006, more than 327,000 complaints. So, not everybody is cool with this, by any means.

And the reason for this? Well, you’re looking at it.

I think that the Parents Television Council, which has truly made it easy for its members to lodge complaints through its website, the reason they exist is that there are a lot of people truly offended by this, who don’t like it. They’ve got over a million members.

But Garvin is of the opinion:

I think, frankly, America’s all mixed up about this. I don’t think Americans know what they want. I don’t doubt that people are really ticked off. You know, Gallup and these organizations do polls all the time, and they show repeatedly that a solid majority of Americans think there’s too much sex and too much violence and too much swearing on television.

Then you turn around and you look at the Nielsen ratings, and more people than ever are watching television. And, what’s more, increasingly they prefer cable television, where the sex and the violence and the dirty words are far more than they are on broadcast. And I don’t think we’ve made up our minds quite yet which direction we’re going to go on this.

The obvious thought is that there is no mind to be made up. As with its near twin, pornography, profanity is acceptable within constraints. So therefore we have areas of the media (and this is of true of Ireland and the UK as it is of the US, although to a markedly lesser extent) where it is permissible to have strong language, and other areas where it is not.

Indeed the ‘confusion’ and ‘mixed up’ aspect of this seems to me to be more akin to hypocrisy, one where the public expression of offense is more important than the reality which is - even now - largely ‘clean’ mainstream media. I can’t help but think that this is an infantilising of people, but, that said, as Garvin notes ‘people are really ticked off’.

NPR also talked to Parents Television Council president Tim Winter shortly after the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favour of mainstream media outlets and ‘fleeting’ usages of expletives and against fines which the FCC had imposed in the wake of a string of cases including the Bono example.

He argues that ‘a Supreme Court decision against a primetime expletive would benefit society at large’.

TIM WINTER: When you hear an expletive aired on an award show and then again the next year, the same award show, a different celebrity utters the same word, at some point in time this no longer becomes fleeting; it becomes a pattern.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: A pattern that, according to Winter, the networks don’t mind.

TIM WINTER: I think the networks not only didn’t discourage their celebrities from doing that, I think there’s some sort of tacit encouragement, that they want the stars to be edgy because they are looking for young teen audiences that the advertisers want most.

His antagonism is fuelled by his personal circumstance…

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The PTC’s motto is “Because our children are watching.” And Winters means it because, in fact, he’s watching his child watching.

TIM WINTER: As a father of a nine-year-old daughter, it became abundantly apparent to me several years ago just how impactful the media was on small children, regardless of how diligent a parent is at protecting what their children are watching.

But the problem is that in the real world this breaks down, for obvious reasons. Open your door, step outside. Or more likely sit around your kitchen table. And even on television there are paradoxes and contradictions.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Context is key to avoiding an FCC reprimand. We spoke with FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein in 2005 and 2006. He explained why Bono’s use of the F word during The Golden Globe Award was indecent, while expletives littered through the film Saving Private Ryan, aired on broadcast TV, were not.

And yet, Bono is speaking as Bono speaks. And although no fan of his, in almost any respect, it seems almost perverse to chastise him and yet to allow the use of expletives in Saving Private Ryan.

JONATHAN ADELSTEIN: In the case of the Bono incident, it was gratuitous. It was during an awards show when parents would not be apprised that that kind of language would be used. In the case of Saving Private Ryan there was many different disclosures done in advance.

Even Senator John McCain went on television before the movie was aired to say that parents may want to be careful about the kind of language that’s being used here. This kind of language is a part of the very fabric of war, and so to change that would change the nature of the film.

We found that, in that context, that certainly use of the language was not indecent. And I’m really disappointed, frankly, that a lot of stations decided not to air it, and I’m concerned that we may be having something of a chilling effect on speech, and we need to avoid that in every way possible.

Of course Adelstein is wrong. “That kind of language is a part of the very fabric of war…” could be easily amended to “That kind of language is a part of the very fabric of the entertainments industry…” or “That kind of language is a part of the very fabric of our society…” and the truth is that most uses of expletives are not meant in an indecent sense but as a sort of reflexive vocalisation to add emphasis.

And Brooke Gladstone asked the obvious, and entirely fair question:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But how can you avoid that, he told us, when the FCC has no consistent criteria for judging what is indecent?

JONATHAN ADELSTEIN: If you look at the so-called Golden Globes case, where Bono used the F word with regard to an award that he got, it wasn’t certainly sexual in nature but we found that it may have been.

And once you go down that path, all of a sudden you have the whole vocabulary in front of you, and you need to make these determinations. And, in fact, I can see why broadcasters would be somewhat confused about what is and what isn’t permissible.

I mean, I think we need to be very careful about how we draw the line here, because the Supreme Court gave us a real short leash on which to determine what is and isn’t indecent. If we overstep in these cases and the Court knocks us down, we could potentially lose what limited authority we have to protect children from indecent material forever. It would actually take a constitutional amendment amending the First Amendment to be able to get the FCC authority back to limit material that we could all agree would be inappropriate for children.

Incidentally, let’s just note that the FCC took the more intrusive line under the Bush administration. Politics is central to this as well.

And politics is central to a complementary piece in the Guardian this week by Peter Preston warning that although:

Ludicrous and lacking common sense, censors were once sent packing. But now they’re back

He notes that:

It’s 40 long years since the Theatres Act swept the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship squad away. Goodbye to immobile, goose-pimpled nudes, shivering on plinths. Hail to the drugged-out hippies of Hair. Welcome, up to a point, to Oh! Calcutta! Here was one great liberal battle won. We’d pulled the dead hand of prim, bureaucratic authority away from our action. Unless, that is, it happened to be called Ofcom.

And here’s the thing. Our old friend the F-word raises it’s head again.

What? You thought Ofcom just fined phone-in companies and lectured the BBC on local video reporting? Read this summer’s low-profile collection of rulings, and be disabused. The F-word makes many people furious, anticipating other terrifying spectacles.

And it’s not just the F-word… once more our old “friends” U2 appear, continuing their trail of destruction through what remains of our popular culture…

Or…try a cameo gig by U2 on The Simpsons (Channel 4, April 15) when one guy in the band called another a “wanker”. Apparently, Ofcom “research indicates that the word ‘wanker’, although quite mild to many people, is clearly offensive language”. So it’s upset to see it scheduled when kids might be eating their suppers. Verdict: a slapped wrist for the “compliance and acquisition teams at C4″, plus more procedural reviews - and a robust ban on premature fondling.

And…

…Try the shambles of seven different shows on four different MTV channels. This includes some very late night text messages on MTV France as well as our problems under rule 1.16, where the rude words were bleeped but other truncated references to body parts and bodily functions remained. And, inevitably, “there was also a conversation about penis size and the age and way in which one interviewee started ‘wanking’” - subject matter deemed “inappropriate at a time (7.30pm) when children were likely to be watching” and therefore a clear breach of rule 1.17 (”designed to protect under-18s from explicit representation of, or discussion about, sexual behaviour unless it is editorially justified”). For which sins, plus a discussion on celebrity drug-taking where the celebs weren’t put under enough censorious pressure, MTV Networks is fined £225,000.

Preston raises the reasonable point that:

Why must we reel in shock when one of Bono’s boys uses a “quite mild to many people” expletive on The Simpsons, while anyone who’s watched that show knows it can display acrid wit at any time of day or night: if you’re sophisticated enough to watch it, and to be allowed to watch it, one wank is neither here nor there.

Those of us with a bone to pick with Bono can think of much better reasons to keep him and ‘his boys’ off our screens. Crimes against music. Say no more.

As for the “inappropriate” discussion likely to harm “under-18s”, have our regulators and legislators become totally separated from their trolleys? At what age does parliament - amid much wittering about teenage sex - think the practice begins? You can join the army at 16. How much “explicit representation” frightens the horses - or the Taliban?

But Preston recognises a broader cultural problem - or hypocrisy, to use the technical term -

What you see here, alas, is familiar Westminster dither as they put “light-touch” regulation into place, and officialdom’s apparatus of imbecility thus ensured. I switched on MTV at random at 6.15 one evening and watched Girls Aloud, bosoms bursting out of whore corsets, rubbing themselves against cod French aristocrats in an orgy of pop sex, as usual. Did anybody complain about kids watching that? Of course not. Yet one trigger word beginning with W, D, C or S sets Ofcom’s wheels turning: and frankly makes wankers of us all.

He has a point.