A View from Riverside Drive

Commentary by Ed Hynes
December 2004

The Monday Night Football flap
and how the New York Times reports cultural rot

All heck broke loose when actress Nicolette Sheridan of the raunchy ABC series "Desperate Housewives" disrobed (or dis-toweled, to be precise) and jumped into the willing arms of NFL star Terrell Owens of the Philadelphia Eagles at the start of "Monday Night Football" on November 15. Millions of families were expecting football.

Cries of "indecency!" rolled like thunder across the land, for good and obvious reasons. The network apologized. The Eagles said they didn't see the spot in advance and wished it hadn't been aired. Ms. Sheridan took some heat but it's been said that any publicity—even bad publicity —is good if they spell your name right.

Mr. Owens appeared to be clueless, but he might have been faking it.

He told the Associated Press he didn't think the raunchy scene would offend anyone, but said he apologized if it did. "I felt like it was clean, the organization felt like it was a clean skit, and I think it just got taken out of context," he said.

To which one might ask: What context?

For the New York Times it was all about male chauvinism and racism; offensive and inappropriate sexual behavior in the public media had nothing to do with it. The paper ran two stories analyzing the flap a week later (Sunday, November 21) under these headlines:

Chauvinism Lives In the Locker Room
Perpetuating Stereotypes About Women and Athletics

In 'Monday Night' Fallout, a Deeper Racial Issue

Talk about clueless. Or was the Times faking it?

Times reporters Harvey Araton and William C. Rhoden turned in stories that supported the headlines, but you have to wonder if the headlines weren't written in advance so the reporters would know what they were expected to report. Too cynical, you say? Give the Times a break, you say?

Consider Times columnist Frank Rich before you get all misty for the poor old "Gray Lady" of journalism. His take on the Owens-Sheridan flap was published on Sunday, November 28, under this headline: "The Great Indecency Hoax."

With more sarcasm than substance, Mr. Rich began, "Oh, the poor suffering little children."

He went on to describe Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell as the "chairman who increasingly fashions himself a commissar of all things cultural, from nipple rings to 'Son of Flubber.'"

He wrote of "the family values mafia" and said that the Owens-Sheridan episode illustrates "how the hucksters of the right work their scam." He wrote that "Rush Limbaugh, taking a break from the legal deliberations of his drug rap and third divorce, set the hysterical tone."

Mr. Rich produced about 50 column inches in this venomous tone. His starting point was this: "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."

Nonmandate? Overhyped? Censorship? Power grab? Ayatollahs?

It's hard to know where to begin.

Frank Rich should know that exit polls on November 2 were only the latest indicators of public attitudes toward the constant depictions of sexual immorality in the media. He should know that every major polling organization that has focused on the matter has found consistently that the vast majority of Americans are alarmed by the moral rot that is common in our pop culture.

Mr. Rich should know that last May, long before the election, the Gallup organization reported that "Roughly four in five Republicans and Democrats alike rate moral values in the United States as 'only fair' or 'poor'...."

Mr. Rich should know that a national poll by Family Circle magazine in 2002 found that many top TV shows got high disapproval ratings from the public because the shows were too "racy, raunchy and violent."

Mr. Rich should know the president won 51 percent of the popular vote after a campaign in which he stressed conservative themes and moral values. (Could it be that this is what put Mr. Rich in a cranky mood?)

Finally, Mr. Rich should be ashamed of his casual misuse of the word "censorship," which means prior restraint of First Amendment rights by government. In its 1978 FCC v. Pacifica decision, upholding the broadcast indecency law, the Supreme Court held specifically that enforcement of the broadcast indecency law did not constitute "censorship:"

"The prohibition against censorship…denies the Commission any power to edit proposed broadcasts in advance and to excise material considered inappropriate for the airwaves. The prohibition…has never been construed to deny the Commission the power to review the content of completed broadcasts in the performance of its regulatory duties."

Speaking of hatchet jobs…

A week before the Frank Rich column appeared in the New York Times, with its reference to "opportunistic ayatollahs," this message arrived at Morality in Media via e-mail:

Dear Christian Taliban, Here's a real review of Kinsey, as opposed to your hatchet job. Undoubtedly, it will do no good to try to reason with religious extremists such as you, but I'll try nonetheless: sex is a natural human function that has been demonized by Christianity. Man is an animal (homo sapien) and the notion that he is anything but is ludicrous, unsubstantiated by even a shred of empirical evidence (your religious beliefs don't qualify). Christianity's efforts to undermine science because it runs counter to your irrational belief system is the true obscenity.

Mike Ramone, Managing Editor, Adult Video News

The "hatchet job" he was referring to was Bob Peters' commentary on the movie. The "real review" he mentioned was published by Salon.com. Mr. Peters didn't like the movie. Salon did.

Congress appropriates funds for obscenitycrimes.org

Congress earmarked $150,000 in the Justice Department's 2005 budget for "the Obscenity Crimes Project to provide citizens with an online tool to report Internet obscenity crimes." The "online tool" is the web site operated since June 2002 by Morality in Media at www.obscenitycrimes.org.

The line item for this project was buried deep in a $388 billion appropriation bill, but together with funds earmarked for additional FBI agents and attorneys for the Department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, it signaled an intention to step up the growing campaign against the hardcore porn racketeers of the San Fernando Valley.

All this caught the attention of the pornographers' "trade paper," Adult Video News, which reported in its online edition that, "2005 could prove to be a troublesome year for the Adult industry, according to First Amendment attorney Paul Cambria. 'Compare this to what has been done in the past, and we're looking at the possibility of a significant crackdown,' Cambria told AVN.com."

Obscenitycrimes.org is operated for Morality in Media by two veteran porn investigators, Roger Young and Tom Rodgers. As an FBI agent in San Francisco and Las Vegas, Mr. Young was a leading authority in obscenity cases. He retired in 2001 after 26 years with the Bureau. Mr. Rodgers, a retired detective lieutenant with the Indianapolis Police Department, is nationally recognized as an expert in child pornography investigations. Back in the days when Indianapolis still enforced the state obscenity law, Mr. Rodgers also conducted obscenity investigations.

In the first 29 months of operation, through this October, obscenitycrimes.org has received 47,986 reports from citizens who believe they were subjected to obscene material on the Internet. These have been examined by Mr. Young and Mr. Rodgers and relayed to the Justice Department, where they have provided the basis of a useful and important criminal database.

Worst thing about porn is it's addictive and it's profitable… like heroin

Pornography is addictive, and so it destroys families and much else of real value. But it pays, too, and for the same reason: it's addictive. Porn has a huge base of hooked customers. And the worst of it, those who produce and peddle hardcore pornography grow rich while those who should be putting them in jail have ignored their duty to enforce the obscenity laws.

Three academic researchers urged the Senate Commerce subcommittee on Science November 18 to provide funds to study addiction to pornography and to mount a public health education campaign based on the findings. Among them was Dr. Mary Anne Layden, co-director of a sexual trauma program at the University of Pennsylvania, who said plainly that pornography's effect on the brain mirrors addiction to heroin or crack cocaine.

A USA Today story out of San Francisco the other day was headlined, "Online porn often leads high-tech way." It reported that porn peddlers have made good use of just about every technological advance in the digital communications age, "from video-streaming and fee-based subscriptions to pop-up ads and electronic billing… Their bold experimentation has helped make porn one of the most profitable online industries, and their ideas are staples at Fortune 500 companies…. Some established companies have quietly dabbled in porn for years. Comcast, the nation's largest cable company and Disney suitor, is one of the most far-reaching distributors of porn. Like other cable and satellite companies, it pipes adult films into pay-per-view TV services."

A small cap stock advisory service is asking this question: Is Small-Cap Porn the Next Big Thing? The answer was yes, because "adult entertainment" companies are going to need to raise lots of cash through the sale of stock in order to pay for broadband technology, the next big thing in electronic communications.

Pay-per-view profits trump principles

Carlson Hotels founder Curt Carlson has let it be known that he is a big supporter of the World Childhood Foundation. We wondered what his policy would be on pay-per-view porn movies on TV sets in his hotel rooms, which is a money-maker for many hotels. Would child-friendly Mr. Carlson join the likes of Omni Hotels in keeping his hotels rooms porn-free? Because of the demonstrable bad effects pornography has on marriage and families, porn in a Carlson hotel would be directly at odds with Mr. Carlson's interest in the welfare of children. We put the question.

A Carlson spokesperson responded, saying, essentially, no he would not keep his rooms porn free. She explained, "Like other hotel companies, we offer pay-per-view movies in most of our properties. The providers of these in-room movie services; such as LodgeNet and others, give hotels no choice as to whether or not to include adult films as part of the service—it is an 'all or nothing' proposition, and hotels are not allowed to remove the adult movies while retaining the rest of them.

Omni Hotels has taken the porn-free course. How? Its press release in 1999 explained the solution was "a newly signed contract between Omni Hotels and a new provider."