From the WSJ Opinion Archives
WONDER LAND
F-Word Fight
Isn't Over Fee,
Fi, Fo or Fum
Decency is dead. Now we're fighting over acceptable indecency.
Bono, the famous rock-music performer, spoke on the TV broadcast of the Golden Globe movie awards last year, and apparently forgetting that he was speaking to millions of people sitting in their homes around the U.S., described one of the winners as "f------ brilliant." Or maybe he didn't forget. Maybe Bono figured, what the heck, characters on American television use every word in the book nowadays. What's the big deal?
Well, it's become such a big deal that everyone in the television business is petitioning the Federal Communications Commission to affirm that Bono had a right--protected by the U.S. Constitution and the needs of the "artistic community"--to say "f------ brilliant" on primetime TV. The House of Representatives has passed legislation that would impose high fines for broadcasting profanity, and the FCC seems inclined to tighten its language rules.
The long list of petitioners to overturn what is known as the FCC's Golden Globe decision includes the ACLU, the Directors Guild, the Actors Guild, the Writers Guild, Viacom, the Recording Industry Association and Penn and Teller. The petition says, "The Commission's aggressive crackdown on 'coarse' speech has sent shockwaves through the industry." Appended to the petition is an article describing the reluctance of radio stations in Madison, Wis., to air ads for Puppetry of the Penis. NBC filed a separate petition, and its president, Bob Wright, published a piece on this page last week.
It is no coincidence that this tension occurs amid recent controversies over Justin Timberlake feeling up Janet Jackson on CBS during the SuperBowl's halftime show, and the firing of "shock jocks" Howard Stern and Bubba the Love Sponge by broadcasters who feared federal fines and loss of license.
At the heart of the petitioners' concerns is the belief that they will suffer great economic loss if their artists are not free to use pooh-pooh or pee-pee and similar expressions on TV or in songs. NBC's Mr. Wright says broadcasters will be disadvantaged because unregulated cable channels are "just a click away." And "vague" strictures on vocabulary will cause "talented writers, producers and actors to flee broadcast television."
There is no doubt a serious academic discussion to be had over the prevalence of the profane in contemporary American comedy and drama. In what ways does the Comedy Channel's crude "South Park" evoke the bawdy Atellan farces of ancient Rome? I would be happy to attend an evening at the New School for Social Research and discuss it with 50 other earnest people. The creative and economic realities of the American mass media, however, have nothing to do with anything in art or law that preceded it. Our mass media is a world unto itself.
The claims that creative work will be stifled unless scriptwriters can migrate Tony Soprano's vocabulary to 9 p.m. on NBC or show the sexuality now on cable TV is false and laughable ("The Sopranos" the past two seasons has melted down into f-dom). I don't recall any writer from Homer til about 1960 "fleeing" because he couldn't use the f-word in front of the whole town. How tempted poor Nathaniel Hawthorne must have been to slip a few f, a, or c-words into "The Scarlet Letter." Ingmar Bergman somehow created cinema's greatest oeuvre on adult sex without producing one scene as explicit as Hollywood now outputs routinely. One of the most sexually charged scenes in American film is Kay Francis seducing Herbert Marshall in Lubitsch's "Trouble in Paradise" (1932), standing in front of him, in formal dress, snapping her fingers.
Back in the apocryphally "conservative" 1950s, Rod Serling, Sterling Silliphant, Paddy Chayefsky, Reginald Rose and others wrote gritty, adult drama without public outcry. If that was the Golden Age of television, we are now in the Iron Age of television. Here's why.
Modern mass media output "product" 24/7. TV's writers have chosen to work in a medium that everyone knew would devour and exhaust every dramatic or comic device, plotline and dialogue imaginable. Having reached the pot of mud at the end of TV's lucrative rainbow, desperate writers and producers are doing toilet humor for laughs and lots of sex to keep viewer's hands off Mr. Wright's remotes. Mass-market pop music is in the same swamp.
The truly brazen authors of NBC's petition to the FCC say, "Live and uncensored programming is the hallmark of a free society." Oh please. It is the hallmark of NBC's need to produce quarter-over-quarter growth in the business it is in.
Income and lifestyle needs aside, the truly serious writers and artists out there should consider where their true interests lie in the Bono/Golden Globe controversy. They should understand (and many do) that this claim of a constitutionally protected pants-drop is simply a race to the bottom that is sucking all the available capital out of the entertainment system and increasingly investing it in junk guaranteed to enrage the majority in what, alas, is still a democracy. If broadcasters and cable networks couldn't slip in f-words and f-scenes to make ends meet, they'd have to try harder to "create" something new that would hold large audiences.
The Golden Globe petitioners claim the new climate is threatening even airtime for oldies like Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side." That's because Mr. Reed's successors took truly ample speech protections and drove them over the cliff. The politicians are simply sweeping up the wreckage.
As to the "decency" police, the very notion is quaint. Decency died years ago and isn't coming back. The standards of the American people have been so beaten down that no public groundswell is likely unless something is really over the top. The argument now is over a social consensus on acceptable in-decency. Not being able to say "f------ brilliant" in front of 30 million people is a small price to pay to keep the gravy trains running.
Last week's column gave readers a chance to contribute money to help restore seven small TV stations in Iraq. The project is the joint idea of the First Marine Expeditionary Force in Al Anbar province, west of Baghdad, and Spirit of America, a philanthropy begun by Los Angeles businessman Jim Hake to assist American GIs in Afghanistan and Iraq. Mr. Hake's goal is to raise $100,000 to buy equipment to upgrade the stations. Here are the results:
As of yesterday afternoon, some 4,965 readers of The Wall Street Journal (and their friends) had contributed $880,321. The individual contributions ranged from $3.50 to $50,000.
Jim Hake is stunned by the response. He says his friends in the Marine Corps are stunned. My colleagues and I are not. The generosity of this newspaper's readership is well known to those of us at Dow Jones who have witnessed it repeatedly over the years.
Mr. Hake is now purchasing the TV equipment--new PCs, camcorders, editing equipment and the like--which will be delivered directly to Camp Pendleton in California and loaded on the earliest available Marine transport plane bound for Iraq. When the dust settles, Mr. Hake will post a verbal and financial accounting of the project on the group's Web site, spiritofamerica.net. I'll follow up again soon.
As to the project exceeding its funding goals, Mr. Hake says this ensures that the rebuilding and upgrading of community TV stations in Iraq can be extended. He has no intention of letting Spirit of America become "big and stupid." Any additional funds will be used as in all the group's projects up to now--to respond to requests initiated by U.S. troops in Iraq or Afghanistan for help with small, nonmilitary civil reconstruction projects.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
