The Singer's Song

Senator Ted Stevens, a Republican from Alaska, caused alarm from Manhattan to Manhattan Beach earlier this month. Speaking before the National Association of Broadcasters, the Chairman of the Commerce Committee – which has jurisdiction over the telecommunications industry – announced his intention to draft legislation that would regulate cable broadcasts. Civil libertarians, television executives and Sopranos aficionados alike were shocked and disappointed at the prospect of neutered programming.

There is no doubt as to who is behind this move. Organizations like James Dobson’s Focus on the Family have tried to impose their morality on television for years. Emboldened by George W. Bush’s victory in the fall, Dobson and others have decried SpongeBob SquarePants’s participation in a “pro-homosexual video” and have had the audacity to protest against the Veterans Day showing of Saving Private Ryan on ABC. They truly put Dan Quayle – who bashed Murphy Brown (as if she were a real person) for having an illegitimate child – to shame.

Any attempt at imposing decency standards on cable broadcasts would be a colossal waste of time. The constitutionality of such regulations is at best questionable. While the Supreme Court found in 1997 that Congress can enact “content-neutral” statutes over the cable industry, it concluded more recently that “[it] is rare that a regulation restricting speech because of its content will ever be permissible.”

Congress restricts radio and television airwaves, the content of which is both free and freely accessible. The FCC can dole out indecency fines to networks and stations whose programming falls outside the accepted social mores. CBS was docked $500,000 for Janet Jackson’s bedazzled nipple but NBC wasn’t for its showing of Schindler’s List in an unedited form in 1997. (Even this raised the ire of one Christian conservative, who proclaimed that network television had sunk "to an all-time low, with full-frontal nudity, violence and profanity.”*)

Cable is entirely different, though. People must pay for the subscription every month to receive the hundreds of channels of potentially indecent programs. Starz!, Sundance, The Movie Channel, et. al. require even larger sums of money for their risky and risqué programming, which is often rife with full-frontal nudity, violence and profanity.

Many of these shows are in fact indecent. Showtime’s honest treatment of Lesbianism in The L Word would not fly if Michael Powell had a say in the matter. The intense psychiatric sessions in HBO’s The Sopranos – let alone the extreme violence – would not sit well with the censors. Anything on Cinemax after midnight would most certainly be nixed. Deadwood, HBO’s newest gem, is the best example of the type of programming that would be effectively impossible under the proposed guidelines. Not long ago it would have received an X-rating for its language, violence or sexual content. Nevertheless, it portrays the Wild West more accurately than any tame John Wayne feature (not to take away from the Duke at all).

With such lewd programming, it’s no wonder that Senator Stevens and Doctor Dobson are angry. Given their strong religious beliefs, it would be unfair to begrudge their efforts to curtail the freedom of speech. Instead of trying to enact unconstitutional legislation, though, maybe they could just change the channel instead.

* Tom Coburn, the brilliant man who said this quote, left the United States House of Representatives three years later – only to be elected to the Senate this fall… by a 12-point margin.