We are locked and loaded for bare -- one more time

OK, so once again, I don’t get it.

The New England Patriots and Carolina Panthers play one of the best, most exciting of all the XXXVIII Super Bowl games. Meanwhile: Democratic candidates are poised for primaries that could determine the party’s presidential nominee. U.S. soldiers are continuing to die in Iraq. A toxic powder is found in Congress, triggering anew fears of a bio-terrorism attack. President Bush releases a federal budget awash in deficits as far as the eye can see. But what story did the media fixate on early last week?

Janet Jackson’s (almost) bare right breast.

Gimme a break.

Was Justin Timberlake wrong to rip off her bustier and reveal her breast? Of course. Was it inappropriate on national television? Absolutely. Tasteless? No question. Stupid? Yes, yes, yes, yes. That’s why it was the buzz at office water coolers, on talk radio and in Internet chat rooms. And that buzz makes it a legitimate news story. One definition of news is, after all, “what people are talking about.”

But was it really a story that warranted yet another media feeding frenzy? Were the media manipulated into giving prominent attention to a fading star who wouldn’t have attracted a fraction of that coverage if she’d done exactly the same thing on MTV? Was it really worthy of Page 1 -- where it appeared Tuesday in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Miami Herald, Kansas City Star, Baltimore Sun, San Francisco Chronicle and Washington Post, among many others? The Post actually put the story, in one form or another, on the front pages of four different sections Tuesday -- the main news section, the Style section, the Business section and the Sports section. The New York Times didn’t put it on Page 1, but it did publish two stories and a column on it.

The story made the network news shows -- morning and evening. It made “Nightline.” It even made some political talk shows.

Now there’s an FCC investigation underway, and in an effort to protect the republic from further trauma, a five-second audio/video delay is likely to be imposed on the Oscar telecast late this month -- and CBS will expand its five-second delay for up to five minutes on tonight’s Grammy telecast.

What’s going on here? A two-second exposure of one mostly bare breast is not the fall of the Holy Roman Empire or a reprise of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Were kids watching the halftime show? Sure. That’s one reason the National Football League asked MTV, not PBS, to produce the halftime show -- to lure younger viewers. Should kids -- younger kids -- be shielded from such displays? I guess so -- though I can tell you that my 14-year-old son saw it, yawned and does not seem to have sunk into a pit of depravity in the ensuing week.

Most kids can (and probably do) see far more -- and far worse -- on their home computers. And they sure see far worse -- exposure to violence, in my view, being far worse than exposure to nudity, partial or otherwise -- not only online but on television, in the movies and elsewhere. Personally, I found many of the materialistic and testosterone-driven Super Bowl commercials far more offensive -- and potentially far more damaging to children -- than a flash of bared breast. If the networks really want to safeguard America’s youth, they should do something about prime-time bloodshed instead of worrying about a halftime garment shed.

Sex tackles football

Pepper Schwartz, a sociologist at the University of Washington, thinks one reason the public got upset by the breast that launched a thousand stories is that “people tuned in expecting violence -- football -- and they got sex instead. So their expectations were violated.

“I love football, so I’m not trashing it,” Schwartz says, “but it’s a very rough sport, and yet we’ve come to think of it as wholesome to have the whole family sit around and watch these big guys bang heads, break bones and go down in pain.”

And then, in the midst of three hours of such organized mayhem, we get upset by the partial exposure of a single female breast? (Actually, given both coaches’ decisions to go for two-point conversions at key points in the game, it was surprising that Timberlake didn’t go for two as well.)

Schwartz, the author of the book “Everything You Know About Love and Sex Is Wrong,” says the media’s reaction to all this was to come riding to the rescue of “the sacred innocence of children.”

“This is such a perfect time for everyone to be righteous because children are involved,” she says. “We act as if children will be damaged by the horrific sight of that breast. The vision is somehow that the American family has been assaulted by MTV on family time. It’s an easy thing for the media to get people all riled about, and that’s the media these days.

“So they go with the ‘poor, innocent children’ theme, rather than the [more appropriate] ‘wasn’t that tacky’ theme.”

But in addition to the understandable -- and at times necessary -- desire to protect children, Americans have a long-standing love/hate (or, rather, lust/bait) relationship with sex. As I’ve written before in this space, we’re simultaneously prudes and voyeurs, both puritanical and panting, sexually repressed and sexually obsessed. We’re shocked -- shocked, I tell you -- that Timberlake would expose Jackson’s breast. Then we replay the exposure, write about it and talk about it ad (quite literally) nauseam.

Yes, we cover it in the context of “a nation aflutter,” as USA Today’s Page 1 headline put it, and as an FCC investigation to determine whether the entire halftime program, including the exposure of Jackson’s breast, “violates indecency standards set in law and enforced by the FCC,” as the Washington Post put it.

An intentional accident?

It’s the bared breast itself that keeps getting mentioned, though. And that may well have been the intent -- a dramatic, attention-getting move to resuscitate a stalled career in front of the year’s largest television audience.

At first, Timberlake said the exposure was an unintentional “wardrobe malfunction.” Then Jackson said his ripping off her outer garment was actually planned but the inner garment was supposed to remain on. Even with both garments gone, though, the breast was still not entirely bare. It bore what The Times called “a large sunburst pinwheel nipple ornament” -- an ornament that seemed about as likely to have been designed for concealment as the hood ornament on a Rolls Royce. Given that -- and given that the crucial line in the song Timberlake was singing at the time was “I’m gonna have you naked by the end of this song” -- one could be forgiven for thinking that full exposure was not exactly an accident.

Josh Gamson, a sociologist at the University of San Francisco, thinks Jackson and Timberlake manipulated the media into massive coverage with “a brilliant, attention-getting move.”

“If your goal is to get attention, especially from people who might buy your albums, it doesn’t matter if Mike Powell [the FCC chairman] is upset or the NFL tries to distance itself from you,” Gamson says.

Gamson, the author of “Claims to Fame,” an examination of celebrity in our culture, teaches a class on sexuality and another about television in our culture, and he says, “All my students in both classes said Monday, before the media began to report that this was intentional, that it was a deliberate publicity maneuver, your usual celebrity marketing shocker, and the media fell for it yet again.”

Yup.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read his previous “Media Matters” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-media.