Every year about this time the television industry unveils a new collection of cops, clowns, sex objects, heroic doctors, and affectionate animals before an increasingly disinterested public. But in recent times the real world has begun to intrude onto the network's fantasy island. Last September the new shows were mercifully delayed for several weeks by an actors' strike. And this year the approach of the new season has found the TV industry embroiled in a fight over prime-time sex and violence with the Coalition for Better Television (CBTV), a group led by some familiar faces of the New Right.
The ruckus started seven months ago when CBTV announced its plans to monitor the sex, violence, and profanity content of network shows and to organize a consumer boycott of companies that sponsor the programs found most offensive. The boycott has since been called off after Proctor and Gamble, the biggest buyer of TV ad time, agreed to quit sponsoring the shows on the CBTV hit list.
As would be expected, CBTV's campaign elicited a strong reaction from the network hierarchies. They called it censorship and, wrapping themselves in the First Amendment, they issued such lofty statements that one would never guess that something as mundane as their profit margins might be at stake. The network executives were joined at the barricades by a number of liberal political activists and church leaders, many of whom echoed the censorship charge and accused the TV crusaders of being a small group attempting to impose its will on the rest of the country.
Particularly vocal in this foray were representatives of an organization called People for the American Way (PAW). PAW was started last year by TV producer Norman Lear with the express purpose of countering the influence of the religious New Right. Its efforts have focused on the production and distribution of public service ads that promote tolerance and diversity in very vague terms. PAW's advisory board includes several mainline church leaders, a handful of academics and activists, as well as the chairman of Seagrams, Inc. and a member of the Rockefeller family.
Whether from liberal activists or network presidents, statements pitting censorship against freedom of choice and defending pluralism and diversity are bound to sound very reasonable and humane. And the narrow and often trivial nature of some of CBTV's complaints has left the organization wide open for such attacks. But in fact the situation is not nearly this simple. Most of the charges that have been leveled against the TV boycott effort betray either ignorance or hypocrisy about the nature of the TV industry.
It is in fact the three networks, and not CBTV, that could better be described as one small group imposing its will on the rest of the country. ABC, CBS, and NBC are the worst enemies of pluralism and diversity in American life today, not a group of worried parents and fundamentalist preachers. While the networks' sex and violence standards have continued to fall in the last few years, TV political censorship is as strong as ever, and the industry shows no interest in serving, or even honestly portraying, minority cultures such as those of blacks, Hispanics, or fundamentalist Christians. A boycott of advertisers is a perfectly legitimate tactic for demanding accountability from an industry whose sole motivation is the accumulation of advertising dollars.
The television networks, and the larger power structure of which they are a part, define democracy as nothing more than access to the marketplace--the inalienable right to sell whatever you can get away with and to buy whatever you can afford. The people who have flocked to the religious Right know instinctively that there has to be more to public life than that. They are demanding more respect for their moral and religious values, but at the root of their discontent is a demand for some voice in the decisions that affect their lives. That is what democracy is supposed to mean.
Some of the New Right political leaders who have pushed their way to the forefront of movements like the one to clean up TV are dangerous men. But the bulk of the soldiers in these battles are Christians from the white working class who have reacted to their feeling of powerlessness by lashing out at the targets, like television, that are nearest at hand. These people don't need to be attacked as enemies of the American Way. They need to be offered an alternative to fear, impotence, and moral drift, an alternative that would be both more democratic and more genuinely Christian than a liberalism that too easily allies itself with the corporate powers that be or a religious New Right whose political and economic agenda ultimately serves those same powers.
It is particularly disturbing to see church leaders becoming involved in campaigns against the religious New Right. Such activity can, as it has in the case of the CBTV controversy, have the effect of aligning the Christian faith with a shaky status quo when it could be a constructively disruptive force for addressing the social, political, and economic as well as moral and spiritual sources of people's discontent.
Danny Collum was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.
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