Anatomy of a news uproar

Janet Jackson’s right breast has replaced Howard Dean’s Iowa yelp as the media meme of the week. And no apology, talk show squabble or late-night joke could approximate the eloquence of Ms. Jackson’s breast itself. Indeed, it’s probably safe to say that no single unclothed televised body part has ever been freighted with so much cultural significance. Like the scream (and its now forgotten precursor, the Dole tumble), the Jackson gland has been repeated, isolated and magnified to a thousand times its size.

The thing in itself merged with everything it could possibly signify. No longer a mere gland, it has been transformed into a unit of cultural information, a meme, transmitted from individual to individual like a virus, by way of constant repetition; a sort of figure-breast onto which to project our collective cultural panic.

I don’t mean to defend Jackson’s sad PR efforts, but we can be relatively certain that her in-tent was not so much to lower our moral standards as to convey what her new album’s producer, Austin Dallas, has described as her “bubbling sexuality” in order to promote an album he calls “easily the sexiest thing she’s ever done.” It should be pointed out that for her, as for most of the female recording artists of the past decade, a certain degree of public sexual “exploration” -- that’s what they call it when the girls do it -- is pretty much compulsory for anyone who intends to get or remain in the employ of the huge media conglomerates that feed them.

For MTV (which had no prior knowledge, etc., etc.), the suggestion of sex -- the entire halftime show -- was just another rote instance of the corporate-sponsored “edginess” and “envelope-pushing” that is putatively expected of it from its parent company. And for CBS, attracting 18- to 34-year-old men, who are defecting to cable in droves, is a priority of which Viacom, one assumes, also heartily approves.

Instead, like all modern media memes -- the scream, the fall, the glove -- the nipple-flash has had a swift, lasting and ultimately negative effect. The popular fundamentalist notion that the female anatomy is the root and cause of immoral behavior has been reaffirmed. The priest with the scissors is back, only this time, it is a combination of a computer software and tech tape equipment that will now allow censors to edit out “offensive” content on the fly with no apparent disruption to live programming.

For now, all mammarian images have been excised from scheduled programs, like the 80-year-old breast of a character with breast cancer on NBC’s hospital drama, “ER,” though one doubts that barely covered breasts will no longer be used to sell beer, as nature and corporate sponsors intended. Ratings are ratings, after all, and something tells me that the next time Britney and Madonna decide to share an intimate moment in front of millions of viewers, we won’t be deprived of it.

The embattled nipple, incidentally, was not covered by a pastie, as early observers noted, but by a nipple shield; the difference being that the former is a self-adhesive micro-garment usually donned for the purpose of circumventing restrictive nudity laws, while the second is a piece of piercing body jewelry worn for the decorative pleasure of it, like a tongue stud. And perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the shield is oddly reminiscent of the “navel jewelry” worn by the dancing girls in the popular harem films of the 1940s, which hid their navels from view in keeping with the regulations of the Hays Code.

That series of decency-related rules went into effect after the Fatty Arbuckle scandal and ensuing backlash, and remained in effect until 1968, when Jack Valenti instated the ratings system. The purpose of the Hayes Code was to prevent movies from “[lowering] the moral standards of those who see [them],” who might otherwise be driven to “crime, wrong-doing, evil or sin.”

It doesn’t matter that half the population missed Jackson’s act of thoracic terrorism when it happened. Mere hours later, of course, it had become impossible to tune it out. “The incident” had been elevated to the highest status the news media accords to any deviant celebrity behavioral event. Soon, Jackson’s breast-baring had joined Dean’s Iowa scream, her brother Michael’s arraignment dance on the roof of his SUV and any number of other embarrassing or deplorable acts by well-known people that broadcast journalists employed by 24-hour news networks -- and the networks that must now compete with them -- are fortunate enough to catch on tape.

“The incident” was soon on constant rotation. Pundits went into overdrive. Apologies were issued in escalating degrees of contriteness: Justin Timberlake said he was “sorry if anyone was offended,” Jackson claimed to be “really sorry,” MTV “regret[ted] the incident and CBS “deeply regret[ted]” it. In fact, “the incident” was determined to have so deleterious an effect on our way of life, small children, potential Cialis customers and everything else we hold dear, that the FCC launched a full-scale investigation into the matter a mere six hours after it happened. She might as well have mailed her bosom to Bill Frist’s office, for the hysteria it has caused.

The Jackson flap is only the latest example of the way 24-hour news has intruded upon reality in such a way that it now no longer reports it, but creates and precedes it. Speaking of the onset of cable news, “Neither journalism nor reality would ever be the same,” Linda Ellerbee says on the upcoming Trio network special she hosts, “Feeding the Beast: The 24-Hour News Revolution,” which airs Feb. 16. “It’s the ultimate reality show.”

But it’s more accurate to say that it’s the ultimate hyper-reality show. As Jon Stewart, one of the people interviewed in the special, says, “Things never used to happen before cable news.” Now they not only happen all the time, but they shape the world we live in. Dean’s campaign may not have been derailed by the 24-hour yelp coverage that followed his Iowa defeat, but it was both the product and the ultimate victim of broadcast news’ need to fill air time with premature predictions and on-the-fly analysis. (As Sen. John McCain learned in 2000, nothing excites the broadcast news media like distinguishing characteristics in a candidate, and nothing turns to blood in the water more quickly.)

The FCC probe inspired by Jackson’s antics has resulted in a five-minute delay being imposed on Sunday’s Grammy telecast -- in which, incidentally, Timberlake is still scheduled to perform, but from which Jackson has been excised -- and a five-second delay put on the Academy Awards on Feb. 29.

So the next time an Academy Award winner decides to criticize the president on TV -- who knows? If it gets cut, at least we’ll know whom to blame.