Anything goes: moral bankruptcy of television and Hollywood

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Jan, 1998 by Joe McNamara

In 1961, Newton N. Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, challenged executives of the television industry "to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you -- and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland....

"Is there one person in this room who claims that broadcasting can't do better? Your trust accounting with your beneficiaries is overdue."

More than three decades later, an intelligent teenage viewer laughs uncontrollably as a dog gnaws on a brain growing outside the head of a young man, who then embraces a number of women dressed in white, spattering them with blood. When asked why he's laughing, the viewer -- my son -- replies, "Because it's funny."

Jerry Seinfeld claims that dropping candy into an incision in an operating room after saying, "All right, just let me finish my coffee and we'll go watch diem slice this fat bastard up," was a turning point on "Seinfeld" because, "Once that happened, it was like the horses were out of the barn. We thought, if we can get away with this ..." (emphasis his). The series' acme, according to critic Jay McInerney (who called the episode "brilliant"), involved doing an entire show about masturbation without ever referring to it by name as "four friends compete to see who can remain `master of [their] domain' the longest."

In a bowling alley, Homer Simpson's decapitated head rolls slowly down the lane towards pins impaled with spikes, driving one of them into the skull, which pops open to reveal a note: "I owe you one brain. Signed, God." Bart Simpson's grace before meals runs, "Hey, God, we did all this ourselves, so thanks for nothing." Lisa Simpson mockingly describes prayer as "the last refuge of the scoundrel."

To all of these incidents, and countless others, my 12-year-old son, with the nodding agreement of his three brothers, proclaims: Don't worry, Dad, none of that is real; it's just television."

Yet, it is real, very real, and much, much more than "just television." For those in their early teens, it is seeing 15,000 sexual acts or innuendoes and a total of 33,000 murders and 200,000 acts of random violence in a single year, according to the American Family Association.

While more than 3,000 studies have documented the inexorable nexus between TV violence and socially aggressive behavior, no one has described the relationship between humor and disappearing moral standards, though the behavioral keys involved are identical. According to psychologists, these are observational learning (attention, retention, motivation, and potential reproduction) and the selection of a model one chooses to imitate.

Studies conducted in Oak Park, Mich., in 1977 and followed up in 1992 showed that "women who watched violent television shows as children in the 1970s are more physically aggressive and more capable of committing criminal acts today." The women who scored at the top of categories "watched aggressive female heroines in the media as children and continued to do so as adults." These results "confirmed some of our worst fears," indicates L. Rowell Huesman, a psychology professor and researcher in the Aggression Research Group at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, Ann Arbor.

Another study by the same institute documented the rise of and rationale for play-ground bullies. After studying the viewing habits of a group of children for 30 years, the researchers concluded that TV violence desensitizes the very young and noted that television "played a larger role in children's aggression than poverty, race, or parental behavior."

Demeaning an important American art form may be bad enough, but abusing children to make a profit at the same time defies comprehension. Syndicated columnist Suzanne Fields noted that "Our children face an unusual enemy of childhood today, grownups who conduct a carpet bombing of information and images against kids who simply don't have the maturity to understand what they see and hear." Understand it they may not, but enjoy it they do, and remarkably few major critics -- with the exception of Diane and Michael Medved; William Bennett; columnists Bob Herbert and Kirk Nicewonger, and Harvard University's Alvin F. Pouissant -- will say a word.

Humor has become a form of psychological violence, but Hollywood's lethal silence among the writers, producers, studios, and critics who lack the courage to face the truth and do what is right remains virtually intact. There are, after all, millions of dollars to be made in exploiting the vulnerabilities of children whose values are not yet formed and who are looking for leadership and role models.

In the case of situation comedies, their laughter directed towards premarital or extramarital sex constitutes positive reinforcement with documentable -- some would say detestably corrosive -- consequences. Apparently, the worst mistake young men or women can make involves choosing abstinence when everything around them reflects the sexual obsession that supposedly typifies life in America.