TV Needs Self-Restraint, Not Censorship

After reading Howard Rosenberg’s television column in which he accused me of trying to dictate what kind of programming goes on the air, I felt like a character in one of those old soap operas who has just discovered he has an evil twin brother. Or in this case, a twin Big Brother (“Why Has What You Watch Become Their Business?,” Calendar, June 20).

The senator whom Rosenberg described is an intrusive busybody who wants to “decide what you watch” and bring government power to bear to ban certain programming from the air. For his censorious ways, this Joe Lieberman is called “scary.”

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If Rosenberg were right, that would be scary. Except it’s not me he’s talking about but a caricature drawn from a set of misguided assumptions about why we in Washington are raising such a fuss about the content of television and what we are asking of the industry’s leadership.

The truth is that I have gone out of my way whenever I’ve voiced concerns about what I see as the declining standards of television to emphasize that I am not calling for any kind of censorship. I am not sponsoring any legislation that would give the government any new authority to control or influence programming content. Nor have I made threats of any kind of government action to coerce the industry to make changes.

What I am doing is exercising my 1st Amendment rights on a matter I believe is of critical concern to the health of our society and I know is of concern to my constituents. Simply put, I fear that the collective force of all the casual violence and crass sexual messages that television is pumping into our homes is having a destructive influence on our kids and our country. And I am asking those who decide what appears on television to consider the impact of their decisions and then hopefully change them for the better.

Let me elaborate a little. Millions of Americans, particularly parents like myself, believe too much of today’s programming is undermining the common values that most of us are trying to instill in our families. And they sense that the erosion of those values is contributing--not causing, but contributing--to a deepening moral crisis in our country, a crisis that is feeding so many of our most pressing problems, from the teen pregnancy epidemic, to the remorseless acts of violence that juveniles are committing, to the general breakdown in civility that lowers our communities and our public discourse.

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Rosenberg need not look any further than his own paper for evidence to support my contentions. On June 13, The Times ran a striking front-page story that featured four families from around the country and their views on television content. Despite their distinct regional, political and socioeconomic differences, these moms and dads were universally disgusted with the hailstorm of perverse messages their children are being bombarded with and fed up with the lame excuses the industry too often uses to slough off any responsibility for the profound influence these programs are having.

These parents would clearly welcome a better rating system that gave them more useful information to warn them about inappropriate content. This is something Rosenberg quickly recognized way back in December, and I appreciate the thoughtfulness he has shown in making the case for a content-based system. As he probably knows, I have been advocating the same thing for many months now.

But as your front-page story vividly demonstrated, what these parents really are crying out for is better programming. They are not seeking, nor am I, to whitewash television of any hint of sex or violence and turn every sitcom into a “Leave It to Beaver” clone. To the contrary, we are just asking industry leaders to remember the ethic of accountability they adhered to for more than a generation in the old NAB Television Code and to show a little more self-restraint.

In other words, we’d like these executives to ask themselves whether they could help parents do their jobs of giving their children strong values and protecting them from harm by bringing back the safe haven of the family hour, by toning down the smutty innuendo that dominates so many sitcoms, by scheduling adult-oriented shows with graphic violence or sexual content later at night as ABC does with “NYPD Blue,” by limiting the amount of cheery, sanitized violence that plagues so much of children’s programming, by ridding the daytime hours of the salacious soap operas and morally bankrupt trash talk shows and, ultimately, by drawing some lines about content that they as programmers simply will not cross just to reach a few more eyeballs.

In raising those questions, I concede that I have used my platform as a U.S. senator to get the industry’s attention and persuade them to listen to the public’s growing ire. That is not just my right, but my responsibility as a member of Congress to give voice to the concerns of my constituents.

But since we’re talking about drawing lines, I think it’s critical for Rosenberg to recognize there is a big difference between exhortation and advocacy on the one hand and coercion and censorship on the other. I certainly plead guilty to the former, but I have made a concerted effort to avoid the latter.

In fact, the irony of Rosenberg’s criticisms is that I have spoken out so strongly specifically in the hope of avoiding government intervention. There are some in Congress who are poised to propose legislation that would ban certain types of programming. I don’t want to go down that road, but if the leaders of the television industry do not emerge from the state of denial they’re locked in and respond to the genuine anger being directed at them and the medium, bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress are prepared to do so. That is not a threat, but an acknowledgment of reality.

The bottom line the television community needs to know is that it does not have a monopoly on the 1st Amendment. The rest of us have rights, too, and we will keep on exercising them as long as the people who run television remain unresponsive to our concerns about the negative impact so much of this great medium is having on our kids, our culture and our country.