A parent who said ‘enough’

Whenever I ask showbiz executives why they do so little to rein in raunchy and violent entertainment, they end up saying that parents have to exercise more responsibility. That’s true, as far as it goes. But as any parent will tell you, the battle against offensive material is not being fought on a level playing field.

Even media-savvy parents are no match for the appeal of a sex-drenched MTV show, an X-rated pop hit or a trashy movie backed with a $30-million marketing campaign.

It’s a David vs. Goliath battle -- except that every once in a while, Goliath takes one in the chops thanks to a parent like Douglas Vanderlaan.

Even though you’ve never heard of him, Vanderlaan is one of the key reasons Clear Channel Communications chief John Hogan and other media-giant executives appeared, apologies in hand, before a House subcommittee investigating indecency in broadcasting.

The hearing came on the heels of the Janet Jackson Super Bowl fiasco. But it also came after a rare show of action from the Federal Communications Commission, which smacked Clear Channel with a $755,000 fine -- the biggest indecency fine in radio history -- for a string of violations by Bubba the Love Sponge, a top-rated Tampa, Fla.-based morning deejay.

It’s amazing how an FCC fine and a scrum of headline-hunting congressmen can get the attention of even the most insensitive media chieftain. Bubba had been doing his raunchy shtick for nearly a decade, from airing a description of a father having sex with his daughter to castrating and cooking a pig in his station’s parking lot.

But Clear Channel waited until two days before the hearings to fire him, instituting a “zero-tolerance” policy and having Hogan issue an abject apology. (Clear Channel at the same time dropped Howard Stern from six stations that carried his show.)

The real hero of this story, however, is Vanderlaan, someone whose name has rarely appeared in the flood of media accounts of the decency debate. The man who brought down Bubba the Love Sponge is a 46-year-old scientist from Jacksonville, Fla., who works for a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary that makes contact lenses.

I confess: I assumed Vanderlaan was a right-wing religious nut or a self-righteous moralizer like Sen. Joe Lieberman who had stopped relating to pop culture around the time Buddy Holly died. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Vanderlaan is a big Prince fan (“I’m going to see him in a couple of weeks”), his favorite TV show is “The Simpsons,” and he’s seen all the “Lord of the Rings” movies.

He plays guitar in his church choir and recently moved his family to the inner city to be an active part of helping get the neighborhood back on its feet. And, oh yes -- he’s a Democrat who plans to vote for Sen. John Kerry. “It’s not fair to say that Democrats don’t care about decency just as much as Republicans,” he says. “In fact, the two FCC commissioners who are the biggest decency advocates [most notably Michael Copps] are Democrats. This is not about politics. This is about kids not having to hear people talking about sex and pornography.”

Vanderlaan is more than just a crusader who made a difference. His three-year battle against Bubba offers a bracing illustration of how little the supposedly all-powerful FCC does to actually regulate the excesses of media conglomerates.

In summer 2001, after one of Vanderlaan’s teenage sons had set the radio to his favorite rock station, Vanderlaan heard Bubba interviewing a woman about her porn website, even suggesting that teen listeners log onto similar sites.

When Vanderlaan called the station manager to ask why he broadcast such material, the manager politely said, “Well, it makes us a lot of money.” Vanderlaan assembled a list of Bubba advertisers and wrote them letters describing the show, prompting roughly 25% of the advertisers to pull their ads.

That got Clear Channel’s attention. Vanderlaan says the radio giant faxed one of his letters to Johnson & Johnson, saying he was using the company’s name to influence advertisers. Then Bubba’s attorney sent a cease and desist letter, threatening legal action. Unfazed, Vanderlaan found Arthur Belendiuk, a Washington, D.C., attorney who taught him how to file an FCC complaint.

As it turns out, even though the FCC has a budget of nearly $300 million, it’s a paper tiger. The agency has never revoked a radio license, has fined only three local TV stations in the past decade, and essentially leaves enforcement to ordinary citizens. If Vanderlaan wanted to nail Bubba, he had to tape the deejay himself -- the FCC doesn’t even require stations to keep a tape file of their programming.

Vanderlaan draws a comparison the Drug Enforcement Agency. “Imagine if you saw someone bringing drugs into the country, and you went to the DEA and they said, ‘Great, but the only way we can prosecute them is if you go undercover and provide us with the evidence yourself.’ ” (Beginning to awaken from its slumber, the FCC hit Clear Channel with a $247,500 fine Friday for the X-rated antics of a Washington, D.C., morning deejay.)

So Vanderlaan put in a tape before he left for work each day and recorded Bubba’s show. By April 2002, he had enough evidence for an FCC complaint. It took 19 months before the FCC, on Jan. 26, finally proposed fining Clear Channel. Vanderlaan wishes more people, including the media, had paid more attention to Bubba’s antics.

The local papers rarely wrote about Bubba unless one of his stunts, like the pig castration, ignited a storm of protest. “It was striking to me how unaware people were of him, even a lot of the advertisers on the show,” Vanderlaan says. “Parents should spend more time in their kids’ media world, learning about what they’re watching and listening to. You may not like rap music, but if your kids are listening to it, you should hear it too.”

Vanderlaan says he’s a big believer in free speech. “But the airwaves are a public domain, just like the public park down the street. And if someone took a cart to the park and sold pornography, why wouldn’t we say, ‘Hey, there are kids here -- go somewhere else’? People should be able to listen to whatever they want, but it’s just nonsense to say that you can’t draw any lines or have any restrictions at all.”

In Hollywood, people seem to have forgotten that you can believe in free speech while practicing personal responsibility. Years ago, before I was a parent, I chastised David Geffen as a 1st Amendment turncoat for dropping the Geto Boyz from his record label after being appalled by the hard-core rap group’s violence and misogyny. “It’s not censorship,” he replied. “Someone else will put the record out. I just don’t want to make money from something I’m ashamed to see my name on.”

Unfortunately many of today’s moguls, imprisoned by their competitive zeal and desire to impress Wall Street analysts, need a nudge to do the right thing. It was only after the FTC issued a damning report and Sen. John McCain dragged a bevy of top studio execs before his Commerce Committee in 2000 that the movie business suddenly pledged to stop marketing R-rated movies to children under 17. It’s depressing but true: Showbiz execs rarely seem to exercise any restraint unless Washington politicians light a fire under their fannies.

I couldn’t get McCain to return my phone calls, but here’s a suggestion: Make the hearings an annual affair. If the Oscars can celebrate quality one day a year, we should have a day to spotlight personal responsibility too. No threats of government interference, no showboating speeches. Just have the heavy hitters, people like Peter Chernin, whose Fox TV has so many tawdry reality shows, or Viacom’s Mel Karmazin, whose film and radio divisions aim lower than anyone else’s, or Doug Morris, whose Universal Music labels consistently release more parental advisory-stickered records than any other major label.

Ask them about their shows and CDs and movies -- do they have any artistic value? Are they proud of the message they send to kids? Or do they exist simply to turn a profit? To help loosen them up, maybe McCain could let them read lyrics or dialogue from their films or shows.

Trust me. It would be a riveting spectacle, almost as much fun as the Golden Globes. The pundits would pontificate for days. Maybe someone would save a front-row seat for Vanderlaan, who should be rewarded for demonstrating that parents needn’t be powerless victims. And the media executives? Being in showbiz, they might even get to enjoy the spotlight. At the very worst, they might start thinking about their coming appearances when they were staring at the new ratings book or perusing the boxoffice charts and suddenly heard an unfamiliar voice whisper in their ear, “Is it really worth it?”

The Big Picture runs Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes

.com.