America's
Moral Dilemma
By Andrew Gumbel
20 August 2004
The Independent
Six
months after Janet Jackson bared her breast for 1.7 seconds on live
TV, draconian censorship and huge fines have changed the face of American
broadcasting - and polarised the country. But the entertainment industry
is fighting back
As obscenity goes,
a flash of female breast is hardly worth bothering with. Magazines from
Vogue to Heat show them all the time. Barely veiled bosoms are on view
on young women in cities the world over.
But this is the
story of one exposed nipple that shook the world. It has been impossible
to ponder the issue of public morality in America these past few months
without wondering whether we aren't living in weird parallel universes.
In the first, 2004 has been the year in which the United States was
caught torturing prisoners in Iraq, was accused of lying about weapons
of mass destruction, and was deemed to be violating the US constitution
and international law by holding so-called "enemy combatants"
indefinitely without trial.
In the second universe,
none of these matters one jot: not as moral issues, anyway. In this
universe - the province of cable television, talk radio and the strangely
hermetic corridors of power in Washington - there has been only one
noteworthy moral outrage in 2004, one thing to offend the consciences
of decent citizens and make them despair of the nation's moral fibre.
We are talking,
of course, of Janet Jackson's prime-time breast exposure during the
Super Bowl, the climax of the American gridiron football season, watched
by tens of millions of unsuspecting citizens splayed in front of their
television screens with bottles of Coke and large bowls of popcorn.
It has been almost
exactly six months since Jackson's singing partner, Justin Timberlake,
ripped open the front of her leather stage outfit to reveal - for precisely
1.7 seconds - the infamous naked mammary gland and its equally infamous
adornment, a starburst-motif silver nipple-shield that one commentator
waggishly described at the time as an "Aztec hubcap".
As cable news stations
replayed the footage again and again, with a variety of pixel-warping
techniques to blur the offending body part, righteous commentators ranted
about how shocked they were, how awful this must have been for parents
with children watching at home, how low America's moral sense of itself
had sunk.
And that was just
the start of it. Within hours, the head of the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC), a government body previously noted mostly for the
dry business of allocating broadcast licences, was denouncing what he
called "a classless, crass and deplorable stunt" and promising
a full investigation, with appropriate sanctions to match. Within days,
the lawsuits began flying - including one from a Tennessee bank employee
claiming, on behalf of "all Americans", that la Jackson and
her partner had caused "outrage, anger, embarrassment and serious
injury".
Within a month,
the issue had been taken up by Congress. The more conservative House
of Representatives had no compunction in voting to increase the maximum
fine for indecency on the airwaves from $27,500 to $500,000 (£275,000).
The Senate - more moderate, but still tilted towards President Bush's
Republican Party - took until June to make its pronouncement, recommending
a smaller but still tenfold increase to $275,000 per infraction. The
99-1 vote on the Senate floor was, intriguingly, rolled into a package
of measures on military expenditure.
More chilling than
any of these legislative initiatives, though, has been both the censoring
and the self-censoring effect on broadcasters, particularly those in
the not-for-profit sector, who are scared out of their wits about being
closed down or fined into bankruptcy. The Senate quite literally voted
for silencers for the military, and silencers for the media, too.
The most immediate
effect was on the radio, where the shock jock Howard Stern found himself
square in the FCC's gun-sights - and responded by dropping his proclivity
for sexual dirty talk in favour of a 12-bore daily barrage of attacks
on the Bush administration. A Florida broadcaster called Bubba the Love
Sponge also felt the heat. Between them, the two men and their broadcasting
employers racked up more than $1m in fines - more than the FCC had doled
out in the previous 10 years.
Television also
felt the flames. A week after the nipple-baring, the long-running hospital
drama ER decided to excise a shot of an elderly cancer patient's breast.
An episode of the comedy That '70s Show in March was preceded by a parental
warning because of a scene in which one character catches another -
who remains off-camera - masturbating.
The bleeping of
three expletives from an episode of a new Public Broadcasting Service
show, Cop Shop, incited the frustration of its star, Richard Dreyfuss,
who said the language was entirely in keeping with the context of his
character, a lonely New York policeman seeking solace in a brothel.
The producers of
the hit youth drama show The OC were told not to show a female character
having an orgasm (though that of her boyfriend, strangely, was allowed
to pass). And a reality show, The Casino, ran into trouble with the
network censors at Fox because of an incident in which a male character
had a Crying Game moment and realised that his prospective sexual partner
was rather more completely endowed than he had imagined.
Is it really plausible
that America has been washed by a spontaneous wave of puritan righteousness,
or is something trickier going on? Jackson's real misfortune may not
have been what she called a "wardrobe malfunction" so much
as the fact that it occurred at the start of the most contentious election
year in memory.
From the start,
she suspected that the outrage vented against her was deliberately manufactured
- by the Republican Party and its more overt supporters in the media
- as a distraction from the very damaging news then coming in about
Iraq's clear lack of weapons of mass destruction. That week, President
George Bush's own weapons inspector, David Kay, had reported back that
the Iraqi cupboard of chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities
was entirely bare. While the Janet débâcle was in full
swing, the President took advantage of the breast chatter to announce
a politically uncomfortable Congressional investigation into the uses
and possible misuses of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Since then, Janet
and all she implies have continued to be a convenient distraction from
weightier issues. On the one hand, the Republicans can play into the
cultural and moral divide their supporters denote by the shorthand word
"values". On the eve of last month's Democratic National Convention
in Boston, pro-Bush protesters held up a sign at a John Kerry campaign
stop in Ohio reading: "Who shares your values?" - alongside
pictures of Monica Lewinsky, Howard Stern, Whoopi Goldberg (who made
genitalia jokes about the President at a fundraiser) and the outspokenly
anti-Bush comedian and writer Al Franken.
The implication
couldn't be more clear: America is battling to save its moral soul against
a Sodom and Gomorrah of godless Hollywood garishness. In this world,
Bill Clinton is an irredeemable sinner and John Kerry is - worse still
- French. As long as the political debate is consumed by such nonsense,
the chances of Iraq, or the budget deficit, or the lack of affordable
healthcare, becoming the topic of the moment are considerably diminished.
The shadow of Janet
Jackson also has the secondary effect of intimidating the broadcast
media - especially that part that might ordinarily be inclined to rail
against the sanctimonious puritanism of the religious right. The FCC
chairman, Michael Powell - incidentally, the son of the Secretary of
State, Colin Powell - has done little to argue against the allegation
that such intimidation is part of what's going on. The FCC has happily
blasted one broadcaster after another with fines (particularly Clear
Channel, a big supporter of President Bush that nevertheless hosted
the likes of Howard Stern) and threatened many more.
The effect in some
quarters has been almost comical. Several stations have stopped playing
Prince's "Erotic City", with its playful but dangerous "I
want to funk you up" refrain. An Indianapolis station has started
bleeping even words such as "urinate", "damn" and
"orgy".
This being an election
year, however, the broadcasters are fighting back. Howard Stern has
been particularly incendiary, calling Powell "a boob and jerk"
in a recent outburst. "Michael Powell is a guy you didn't vote
for, a guy who got his job because his father works for the Bush administration...
He's a crackpot, and I have said he's a crackpot." As Stern attracts
an audience of eight million, his on-air haranguing has some Republican
operatives worried that he has the power to swing a close election.
The executives are
not taking the intimidating new atmosphere lying down, either. CBS,
the network that broadcast the Super Bowl, reacted timidly at first,
agreeing to delay live broadcasts of showbiz events by five seconds
to forestall malfunctions, sartorial or otherwise. It also cancelled
a television biopic on Ronald and Nancy Reagan, attracting the ire of
many of the same grassroots Republicans who spilt their bile about Janet
Jackson.
Now, however, CBS
- particularly its top executive, Les Moonves - has found its teeth.
When the FCC floated a figure of half a million dollars as an appropriate
fine for CBS and its regional affiliates for what many have tagged "Nipplegate",
Moonves said he would take the commission to court before paying a penny.
He described the threat to freedom of speech as "perilously dangerous"
and said it would be "grossly unfair" to penalise CBS for
something that was clearly not the network's fault.
A handful of artists
and musicians have gone further in condemning the Bush administration's
approach. Powell may, in fact, be the first FCC chairman to inspire
not one by two songs by well-known artists. The first, by the country
rocker Steve Earle, a well-known activist for liberal causes, is called
simply "F the FCC". Its chorus pulls no punches: "I can
say anything I want/ So fuck the FCC/ Fuck the FBI/ Fuck the CIA/ I'm
living in the motherfucking USA."
The second, by Eric
Idle of Monty Python fame, draws from much the same inspirational well:
"Fuck you very much, the FCC/ Fuck you very much for fining me/
5,000 bucks a fuck/ So I'm really out of luck/ That's more than Heidi
Fleiss was charging me."
Powell is an intriguing
figure: much more conservative than his famously temperate father, and
almost brazen in his willingness to pander to the powerful interests
of the broadcast world while virtually ignoring the voices of consumer
and public-advocacy groups. Famously, he told Senators at his confirmation
hearing that he did not know how to define the public interest and that
he had "waited up all night for the Angel of the Public Interest
to visit with the answer, but she never came".
Since then - and
particularly in light of his proposed deregulation of the airwaves,
allowing an unprecedented degree of television and newspaper cross-ownership
- a group of activists calling themselves the Angels of the Public Interest
have dogged him at every public appearance. Powell has cancelled at
least three public hearings at which they vowed to give him a verbal
roasting.
Powell's definition
of obscenity appears rather slippery - he once said he didn't need a
lawyer to point it out to him because he knew it when he saw it. All
fine and good - except that Bono's "fucking brilliant" at
the 2003 Grammys was originally considered by his office to be OK (merely
adverbial usage) but was then redefined as a finable offence. Similar
confusions reign just about everywhere. "The problem is that the
FCC is trying to enforce a standard that doesn't exist," the executive
producer of That '70s Show, Jeff Filgo, said after his run-in with the
censors. "It's almost like they're saying, 'What's indecency? That's
for us to know and for you to find out.'"
The Bush administration's
case was undermined when Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, was caught
using highly abusive language on the Senate floor to advise a venerable
Democrat to perform an anatomically impossible manoeuvre. The Republican
rank and file rushed to Cheney's defence, saying he was merely letting
off steam in a harmless way. But they have also taken a bit of a break
from lording it over everyone else. The Vice-President is lucky that
he didn't utter the fateful phrase on the radio. Or bare a nipple.
And as for Janet?
Well, the album she released soon after the wardrobe malfunction, Damita
Jo, sold poorly and is now being remarketed. She went on to spoof her
exposure on Saturday Night Live and on the cover of the music magazine
Blender. Last week, Jackson announced that she will play herself in
a cameo on the hit television show Will and Grace.