More Morals

By now many of you have been beaten to death with the “moral outrage” of Nicolette Sheridan’s bare back on Monday Night Football. You haven't? Well, tune in to the evening news in case your kids missed it during half time. Rush will probably be showing it, too (or, at least, moaning about it).

Haven’t these evangelical types learned anything from controversies past? When you raise a stink about something, it only brings it front and center for all who missed it. The “offensive” becomes an issue that is re-played and analyzed like a Zapruder stag film. See the furor over LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST or the recent pair (no pun intended, Ms. Jackson) of Monday Night Football incidents for how far a tempest can can be taken out of the tea cup.

Thanks to Seattle’s own Harry James Connolly, I was sent an article by Frank Rich of the NY Times that shows the crooked lengths the moral majority will go to in order to save our souls. Thank God (the true God, not Pat Robertson) there’s someone out there like Mr. Rich to give us these statistics:


"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."


I think what’s more scary to these moralists is not that indeceny is on the airwaves, it’s that most of the people like the indecent. It’s hugely popular on the airwaves. People flock to stuff like reality shows, Howard Stern and, well, Monday Night Football (hardly a bastion for family values). We enjoy it for what it is...entertainment. It doesn’t mean we are morally bankrupt. It means we have a sense of humor and a moral perspective incapable of being shaken up by Janet’s boob (although the nipple ring went a little too far). Look at the success of DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES, as Mr. Rich illustrates yet again:


""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". "


Sadly, as I’ve stated before, the moral cranks have been empowered and, whatsmore, with their puppets in the White House and Congress, we have a new breed of pit bull watch dogs out there. The problem with pit bulls is that they are known to maim and kill the innocent.