Is Stern Worse Than Fox’s ‘Color’?

What is indecency? There is no universal definition, and that’s the problem.

The myopic Federal Communications Commission thinks it applies to radio “shock jock” Howard Stern, and has fined the company he works for $600,000.

As the self-styled Stanley Kowalski of the airwaves, Stern is a streetcar named opportunism, shrewdly exploiting his notoriety by making tastelessness and boorishness his badges of honor. When he speaks, you cringe almost as often as you laugh.

Yet why single him out?

The worst thing that the FCC can do is act as a super-censor by involving itself in program content, whether radio or TV. The next worst thing it can do is operate by a double standard that discriminates against one program and its star.

What is more indecent, for example, than repeatedly smearing and ridiculing persons solely because of their sexual orientation? Not on radio in a drive-time program whose appeal to impressionable little tykes is minimal at best (the notion of masses of tots being mesmerized by Stern’s rambling patter is farcical), but on television, at 8 p.m. Sunday.

Really now, is Howard Stern any more indecent than the Fox series “In Living Color”?

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) in Los Angeles is justifiably irate about a recent sketch on “In Living Color.” So much so that it fired off a complaint to Fox accusing the series of airing “extreme, stereotypical portrayals of supposedly gay men that are not balanced by anything else on the show or, for that matter, much else on the Fox network.”

The Dec. 13 sketch in question nourished a perception in some circles about what would occur should a ban on gays in the military be lifted: Swishing soldiers. The sketch showed mincing, prancing effeminate men in a barracks awaiting the arrival of a drill sergeant, one of them wearing his shirt tied in a knot above the waist, another appearing to get a sexual charge from being berated.

Although it savages many targets, “In Living Color” is probably most famous for its recurring “Men on Film” segment featuring two flamingly gay movie reviewers who salivate just thinking about males. It’s a cheap laugh.

GLAAD, which acknowledges that some gays don’t object to the homosexual stereotyping on “In Living Color,” nonetheless continues to find the portrayals offensive and even potentially lethal, given the level of violence against gays in the United States. The sketch in question, charged GLAAD/LA executive director David M. Smith, was “based solely on material that could have been written by Pat Buchanan or any of the other right-wing, gay-hating fanatics that are campaigning to deny gays and lesbians equal rights.”

Buchanan should sue over that comment. Although equally narrow-minded when it comes to gays, he is a much funnier writer than the Plutos working for “In Living Color.”

After starting fast in 1990, “In Living Color” has been continually sliding, its most striking component now being crudeness. Crudeness without humor.

It’s one thing to exaggerate. Satire always entails exaggeration. It’s quite another thing, though, to create comedy, like the gays-in-the-military sketch, that feeds a dangerous distortion about an entire segment of the population. There is enough homophobia out there without some third-rate comedy writers thickening the pollution with the blessing of a major TV network.

Mister “Masterpiece”: He was upstairs, he was downstairs.

So there’s something melancholy about Alistair Cooke disappearing from that gentrified old PBS series “Masterpiece Theatre,” if only because, like England and the monarchy, he and the show have always seemed inseparable.

You might as well sever a limb.

As England’s greatest contribution to U.S. television, “Masterpiece Theatre” has been steeped in a culture that PBS felt needed interpreting for viewers here. The English-born Cooke filled that role masterfully for 21 seasons, just as he, for decades, has been using the radio to explain the United States to the British.

Thus, when you recall “Upstairs, Downstairs” or “The Six Wives of Henry VIII” or “The Jewel in the Crown” or “Testimony of Youth,” the image of Cooke as a suave, gleaming icon of gentility and civility intercedes, all sage and silvery in his elegant surroundings on Sunday nights, full of anecdotes and observations.

His Alistairship didn’t have to be amputated from “Masterpiece Theatre.” He departed on his own recently, saying he’d finally had enough after all these years. That’s understandable. You wonder, though, if his leaving wasn’t hastened at least in part by the knowledge that “Masterpiece Theatre” had leveled off and was no longer widely discussed or quite as special, that with British television itself in a state of transition and uncertainty, the quality and consistency of imports had dropped off.

All the while, though, Cooke’s quality and consistency stayed the same.