TV’s big language debate

HAVING just returned from Europe, where language and nudity standards for television are much more lax than here in the States, I find it laughable that decency groups are lobbying Congress to enforce their personal tastes [“A Word or Two About Slipping TV Standards,” Oct. 14].

Instead of trying to impose their beliefs on the rest of us, perhaps these watchdogs should focus on imposing them directly on their own children and stop requiring that the rest of us, including broadcasters, baby-sit for them.

Christopher Dye

San Diego

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TIM WINTER, president of the Parents Television Council, dislikes the apparent “. . . thousands of expletives on MTV or Comedy Central,” that he claims he is forced to buy.

Who exactly is forcing him to buy these channels? Mr. Winter, if naughty words are going to be so harmful to you, perhaps you should take advantage of the parental controls on your cable or satellite box. Even better, don’t watch those shows or the channels that broadcast such harmful words.

Winter claims broadcast TV should be held to a higher standard because it is not a “New York taxi stop, not a football locker room, not the way a vice president may talk in private.”

But it is broadcast television that gives us the violence on the football field and that updates us on the constant violence and countless wrongdoings of the players in the NFL. It is broadcast television that updates us daily on the destruction and loss of life in Iraq, a war that our vice president was more than eager to get us into.

If we could only have a V-chip for that.

Sean Stowell

Huntington Beach

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ENOUGH is enough.

I’m a fairly progressive film professional who often gives $5 to the ACLU volunteers collecting outside my local Santa Monica coffee shop.

But when I caught a recent episode of the Showtime series, “Weeds,” in which Justin Kirk posed as a caterer to sneak onto a porn set to watch naked actors simulate a threesome, and as the dialogue degraded from there, I felt I had seen and heard enough. I called my cable company and swapped out Showtime for a sports package.

Robby Henson

Santa Monica