The Weekly Fare . . . January 27, 2005

MTV: "Misappropriated Television"

I remember when MTV first came out. It was August of 1981 and we were thrilled. Twenty four hours of non-stop, coast to coast music. For a bunch of semi-hard living, music loving, "give me freedom or give me more sleep" college students this was big news. Finally - the entertainment industry had woken up to the dormant market that was "us."

And what a market we were. It didn't take long for Viacom to realize they had a tiger by the tail in the 18-28 age bracket. We might be short on real dollars but we knew how to spend what we had - and usually it was either on things our parents still don't want to hear about, or cassette tapes and "albums" produced by our favorite bands.

Down in little ol' Farmville VA, where I found myself at the time, we didn't have cablevision yet, but we knew it was coming. We could see the future - and the future was going to be good!

My, oh my, how times change.

Have you checked out MTV lately? I have - and whenever I surf on by, I am absolutely floored by what I see. And it's not so much the nature of the music videos which were originally the staple of MTV's offering, (though many are pretty rough) but the "original series" that promote the most perverse and degrading material imaginable. It honestly fills me with the kind of rage I might experience if I were witnessing a live act of child abuse - which is, indeed, exactly what I'm witnessing.

Last week the Parents and Television Council released their report on MTV and this is what they found:

MTV averages over 3050 flashes of nudity or explicit sexual portrayals per week - that's over 435 per day. Or right at 20 per hour. This does not take into account the 2880 VERBAL references to sex per week which translates to a total of over 37 "flashes," "portrayals" or "references" per hour . . . Meaning you can't go much over a minute on MTV without getting a message that, "if your not having easy sex like these cool people then something must be wrong with you."

The PTC also discovered that this extraordinary average reflects programming at ALL times of the day - that at any given moment, MTV has roughly THREE TIMES as many "incidents" as CBS, NBC, ABC or FOX do AFTER 10:00PM. (Have you watched the networks nighttime programming lately? Now there's some good company.)

I'm not talking about innuendo here folks. I'm talking raunchy, anything goes, sleaze - so graphic in nature that Hugh Hefner might blush. How about a "human sundae competition" where men lick whip cream from women's bodies with a cherry for each breast . . . Or five women in "swimsuits" rubbing lotion on a man using everything but their hands . . . Or pantomimes of intercourse and oral sex that would have easily garnered an "X" rating in 1981.

MTV's response?

"It's unfair and inaccurate to paint MTV with that brush of irresponsibility . . . We think it's underestimating young people's intellect and level of sophistication . . ."

"Underestimating their intellect and level of sophistication?"

Are you feeling nauseous yet?

Well, here's the number that might get you there, and read it slowly so that you can take it in . . . According to current Nielsen Ratings, MTV is watched by 75% of all boys and girls between the ages of 12 and 19. Yup, it's "their channel" - the one they watch like you and I might watch, say CNN, ESPN or PBS for daily news.

Please note that I have mentioned nothing of the systematic "programming" of young minds to buy into the "commercial machine" - the one that indoctrinates children into the pop culture malaise where "being perfect" is consuming this much of brands "X, Y and Z" and weighing "this" and wearing "that." (See: "The War Within") Nor have I covered the similar statistics relative to the acts of violence portrayed.

Maybe a more honest response for MTV would be, "Hey -it's a free world isn't it!"

It sure is - in some places . . . And it has to make you wonder about the limits of freedom to produce a society with true and lasting "liberty and justice for all."

I support America's present attempts to "secure her security" and answer the moral call to establish freedom in places where nothing short of tyranny and anarchy reign. But I must confess that I find that I am very uncomfortable with the direction that unbridled freedom so often seems to lead. I think we all need to be reminded that the Founding Father's little experiment has placed upon us a tremendous responsibility to get it right. To provide freedom, but fail to establish a reasonably acceptable standard of social morality is to give credence to the extreme that would deny such individual freedom entirely.

Imagine all the decent and upright Muslims in the Middle East who wholeheartedly disagree with the methods and tactics of the extremists around them, but who, after witnessing the raw filth and wretchedness that pours forth from the font of America's so called media giants, sympathize completely with the extremist's motivations. I know some part of me does.

Do Viacom, Time Warner and News Corp represent the real American culture?

Or are we - can we be - something else?

Perhaps our future security depends not so much on how well we succeed in the spread of freedom, as it does in how we choose to "live our freedom."

For the love of humanity, and for the greater Love we are given, I hope we get it right.

***********************************************************
I have never done this, but I'd like to include the comments my wife sent back in response to this column (She is perhaps the best editor of both my written and spoken word). I would have just worked them in, but I don't think I could quite capture her passion . . .

HBO and MTV have been so successful with their original series that (on CH. 13?) Desperate Housewives (a show about infidelity) is now one of the top rated shows on TV. And of course all the reality shows are spin offs from these channels. You should encourage parents to sit down with their children who watch MTV and see what they are watching so you can explain why this behavior is atrocious or ban it completely. Women are degraded - groups of gyrating bimbos with bad breast jobs in skimpy clothing hanging on the leg of some ghetto rapper with furs and "bling" worth thousands of dollars wrapped around them and leaning on their Ferraris . . .

But I digress.

Anyway, good job.