Television and Ethics
Disturbing trends-Sex, violence and the FCC
The FCC has failed in its role as a moral dictator. Television loves the bomb and hates the breast. How justified violence and Victorian attitudes dominate the media.
Television programming suffers from a fatal disease. The name of the disease is corporate ownership. Nowhere in American society is the death of a culture more apparent than on the tube. With its emphasis on God, guns and patriotism, corporate control of this once great medium has reduced it a tool of propaganda.
Television and radio operate by means of broadcast frequencies owned by the public. As a regulatory agency, the Federal Communication Commission was an after thought. The FCC, formed in 1934, is a federal agency whose prescribed duty is to regulate all NON-FEDERAL and interstate telecommunications. Yet, due to the political nature of the its appointed composition, the FCC now serves the military, corporate industrial complex with arbitrary rulings that serve a conservative political minority.
This country, founded on the separation of church and state, yet imbued with a Christian sense of piety and censorship,consumes a strict TV diet of oatmeal with a side of sanitized violence. The arbiters of America’s morality seem more concern with “dirty words” and bare breast than the nightly news broadcasts of gore. Using words like “indecent” and “offensive,” the FCC force feeds human morality on steaming plates of tasty hypocrisy.
Nipplegate
During Super Bowl XXXVIII, Americans were treated to, or insulted by, a very brief shot of Janet Jackson’s breast. The incident known as Nipplegate generated 200,000 American complaints– less than ten percent of the population. The FCC eventually levied fines amounting to millions of dollars. By contrast, less than fifty Canadians complained to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council.
Inexplicably, the FCC seems much less concerned about television violence and its effects on the population. An obvious example of this bias was the live primetime broadcast of the destruction of Baghdad. The morbid glorification of lethal technology that resulted in the death and mutilation of countless men, women and children did not fall within the FCC’s category of “indecent.”
The impact of violence on TV
Excluding this apparent cultural appetite for the destruction of innocents, we need only consider some rather dark statistics to see that as passive viewers, we are much more comfortable with violence than naked displays of flesh. From the website of parentstv.org:
"Well over 1000 studies… point overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children. The conclusion of the public health community, based on over 30 years of research, is that viewing entertainment violence can lead to increases in aggressive attitudes, values and behavior, particularly in children…. By the time that child is 18 years-of-age; he or she will witness 200,000 acts of violence, including 40,000 murders. One 17-year longitudinal study concluded that teens who watched more than one hour of TV a day were almost four times as likely as other teens to commit aggressive acts in adulthood.”
While statistics can be deceiving, the overwhelming evidence of these numbers indicate a serious chasm between the pious language of the FCC and the reality of our culture’s growing obsession with broadcast images of violence and death. Violence is good, sex is bad? Is this the legacy of the neo-Victorians now driving the culture?
Before we solve the problem, we must ask the questions. Here’s an idea. Call the FCC. Complain about violence. Stop watching violence. Stop buying violence. It’s not much, but it’s a start.
