Parents should talk to kids, not to the FCC

As a parent of a teenager, I couldn’t disagree more with Patrick Goldstein’s column of March 16: “A Parent Who Said ‘Enough.’ ” His article is shocking in the blatant disregard for free speech he apparently advocates, in the simple-minded refusal with which he sees the parental role and in the blind inability to see what his advocacy portends.

Goldstein says that parents are no match for “the appeal of a sex-drenched MTV show,” but I contend he’s wrong. You exercise your judgment and character-building from the time your kids are young. You raise them to understand right and wrong, civil liberty and free speech.

They learn from you what is just and what is satire and maybe what a good movie is and what makes a great rock song.

There’s no greater influence on a kid’s life than his parents, even if your teenager doesn’t want to admit it. Frankly, those big movie-marketing campaigns don’t stand up to the taste and values each parent demonstrates daily in his or her household.

Goldstein holds up Douglas Vanderlaan as a hero for calling a radio station manager, writing advertisers, going to see attorneys and filing a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission after he heard his teenage sons listening to the Bubba the Love Sponge radio show.

Nowhere does he mention whether Vanderlaan ever just turned off the radio station his sons had tuned into.

The public airwaves are not a park where pornographers are peddling their goods to our youth, as Vanderlaan so luridly fantasizes. No one is being forced to listen to anything; the choices are numerous and clear. And unless I missed the headline, none of the radio personalities Vanderlaan has railed against has been convicted of any crime, much less of selling pornography.

I confess I have never heard the Bubba the Love Sponge show. I guess I never will now. I have heard Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura and Harry Shearer. (I used to enjoy listening to Sandra Tsing Loh too.) They all have their purposes and personal agendas and they are all there if you want them. If you don’t, guess what: click.

What Goldstein and Vanderlaan seem to forget and negate is their own power to influence, argue and, if necessary, shut it down. Instead of allowing the free flow of good and bad, worthwhile and even tasteless programs to find their way onto the American airwaves, Goldstein advocates some kind of governmental dog-and-pony show with John McCain forcing film and music executives to read aloud the dialogue and lyrics their companies release. I think I’d rather hear Bubba the Love Sponge.

Obviously, Goldstein and his “hero,” Vanderlaan, have not thought their advocacy through. What begins as governmental hearings into “the arts” has the swift potential to turn into censorship.

Even if indirectly, the heat of Washington pressure always has an immediate and chilling effect on artists and creativity. What begins with the Sponges and the Sterns has a way of sweeping up in its path not only the sexual and the stimulating but also the satirical and the politically critical.

The fact is that there will always be lousy radio and TV shows, smutty movies and even shockingly foul-mouthed rock ‘n’ roll music. Some of that stuff I will listen to and watch; some I might even find entertaining. Others won’t. They can turn it off and tell their kids to do the same.

That’s what free speech is all about.

Lee Cohen is a Glendale-based writer whose works include (with Mona Golabek) “The Children of Willesden Lane” (Warner Books, 2002).