E-Mail This Article to a Friend The next great indecency threat (continued)

• As if the efforts by Stevens and Wyden were not enough to demonstrate the bipartisan nature of the war against indecency, Democratic senator Jay Rockefeller, of West Virginia, and Republican senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, of Texas, are co-sponsoring a bill that would order the FCC to study the effectiveness of the V-chip and other parental controls — and to impose anti-indecency and anti-violence regulations on cable and satellite if it finds that those controls are ineffective. "I would welcome voluntary actions by the industry to address both indecency and gratuitous violence, but they aren’t stepping up to the plate, and that’s why Congress cannot wait any longer to protect our communities and our families," Rockefeller told the New York Times. "If the industry won’t protect our children from gratuitous violence and indecency, then we must act."

Rockefeller’s definition of voluntarism — volunteer, or else — says much about what is going on. Congress and the FCC are moving ahead rapidly in their crackdown on the broadcast industry, where they have unchallenged legal authority to regulate and prohibit indecent programming between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., the hours that children are most likely to be watching or listening. In 2004, the FCC proposed levying $8 million worth of fines — up from just $440,000 the year before. Congress appears poised to raise the fine for indecency from $27,500 to $500,000. Republican congressman James Sensenbrenner, the powerful chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has gone so far as to suggest that the most egregious violators of broadcast-indecency standards should be prosecuted and imprisoned.

The climate pervading the broadcast world today is one of fear and caution, with television-station managers going so far as to wonder whether running the unexpurgated version of Saving Private Ryan would get them in trouble with the FCC, and PBS yanking an episode of Postcards from Buster because a cartoon rabbit meets two families headed by lesbian couples. PBS also warned its affiliates that it could not protect them from the FCC if they broadcast a profanity-laced Frontline documentary about American soldiers in Iraq. Nor is entertainment programming on PBS exempt: last year, the network edited a British episode of Masterpiece Theatre, offering two versions to its member stations. Indeed, the notion that public broadcasting will be a refuge for sophisticated, adult-oriented entertainment may well fall victim to the indecency crusade. Now, granted, PBS is a special case, under assault from the likes of Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and Corporation for Public Broadcasting chairman Kenneth Tomlinson, the subject of a recent New York Times investigation into his attempts to pull public television and radio to the right. Nevertheless, if the war against indecency has spread to news programming such as Frontline, then the move toward an unusually pernicious level of censorship is very far advanced.

Given how successful the forces of repression have been in cracking down on broadcast indecency, the sense on Capitol Hill is that they don’t want to blow it by overreaching — at least not this year. According to a congressional source who works for a liberal Democratic House member, Congress is unlikely actually to pass a law that would regulate indecency on cable or satellite. Rather, the idea is to threaten and cajole, and use the specter of regulation to extract concessions. "Most of them recognize that it’s constitutionally problematic, but they’re using it as a club to force a family-friendly tier," says this source.

In other words, volunteer — or else.

THE PRESS CORPS swooned with delight and admiration when Laura Bush delivered her unexpectedly racy monologue at the White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner recently. The raunchiest — and funniest — line involved her husband giving a hand job to a horse: "I’m proud of George. He’s learned a lot about ranching since that first year when he tried to milk the horse. What’s worse, it was a male horse." She also paid tribute to Desperate Housewives, the sexually loaded television show that has been a target of the indecency cops since it debuted last fall — and that (get this, red-staters) was created by a gay man.

Ironically, the new FCC chairman, Kevin Martin, whose elevation by President Bush had been devoutly wished for by both the Parents Television Council and the religious-right organization Focus on the Family, once disagreed with his predecessor, Michael Powell, over the question of whether an episode of Fox’s Keen Eddie was indecent. Powell thought it wasn’t; Martin thought it was. For the record, the episode involved — well, a prostitute giving a hand job to a horse. No doubt Laura Bush would have sided with Powell. But after Powell stepped down earlier this year, her husband gave the chief censor’s job to Martin.

Yes, there is a lot of hypocrisy in the war against indecency. The president himself has given mixed signals on whether to extend indecency regulations to cable and satellite. In a sign of just how absurd this has become, he also signed legislation recently that exempts a company that excises the naughty bits from DVDs from being prosecuted for copyright violation. But if Bush’s heart doesn’t quite seem to be in the indecency crackdown (after all, his wife needs something to watch after 9 p.m., when he goes to bed), his head certainly is. Going after those cultural elitists in the entertainment industry is good politics.

The notion that indecency must be regulated in the first place is based on the belief that somehow it’s bad for children. As Marjorie Heins points out in her 2001 book, Not in Front of the Children: "Indecency," Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth, this idea dates back to Plato, who wrote that "it is most important that the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts." In the Victorian era, censorship became inextricably linked with the belief that masturbation was a dangerous, unhealthy habit, and that anything that might be used as an aid to self-gratification must be banned. Movies (two beds, please), early television, and even comic books paid tribute to these beliefs by implementing strict self-censorship schemes.