The Super Bowl festivities seemed a little vanilla this time around.
In what can only be considered gross overcompensation for last year's debacle, this year's half-time show was headlined by Paul McCartney in a suit. The songs he performed were pre-screened by NFL officials for potentially offensive lyrics. The performance's raciest moment was when McCartney stripped off his jacket- only to reveal a long-sleeved shirt underneath.
As writer Bob Garfield told "Good Morning America," "This year, the Super Bowl is interesting not because of what ads they're showing but what ads they are not." Notably cut: a Budweiser ad that had a delivery boy opening a beer with Janet Jackson's costume, a spot for a cold remedy featuring Mickey Rooney's bare backside, and a minister lusting after a Lincoln pick-up.
The edgiest ad shown was, like the Budweiser ad that got cut, a spoof of last Super Bowl's "wardrobe malfunction" incident. Though the company had shelled out $4.8 million for two airings of the 30-second spot - which the Fox network itself had screened for content -- the ad only ran once. After seeing the spot during the first quarter of the game, NFL officials contacted Fox in medias res and asked them to pull the second showing, apparently considering it too edgy in the post-Jackson world.
This may seem a lot of wolf-crying for what essentially amounts to some toned-down ad copy. But though I hate to start down the slippery slope of crying censorship, the question is whether the FCC has overstepped its bounds by intimidating networks into submission.
You may remember the immediate aftermath of the Jackson incident: the Oscars went to a five-second tape delay so they'd have time to cut or bleep any spur-of-the-moment actions; the Grammys were delayed five minutes.
The ripples, however, keep spreading. The FCC itself won't pre-screen broadcasts, because according to an FCC spokeswoman, "that would be censorship," so 66 ABC affiliates in eight states refused to broadcast Saving Private Ryan for fears of potential indecency fines. In May, a popular college radio station switched to an entirely pre-recorded format. Other stations that previously dabbled in the risqué during "safe harbor hours" between 12 a.m. and 6 a.m. toned down their broadcasts in the fear that the hours were no longer safe.
We are entering a place where the content of the airwaves is subject to tyranny of the minority - and a very small minority at that.
In 2003, the year before the Super Bowl debacle put broadcasting indecency on the map, the FCC received 240,000 complaints. After the Jackson incident - a stunt that sparked 540,000 complaints all its own - the trend continued. By the end of 2004, FCC fines totaled $7.7 million, compared to only $48,000 four years ago.
Why the sudden outrage? Has the quality of programming really taken that much of a dive? Has the public suddenly become more concerned about the shows being broadcast in their home?
Neither is the case. In 2003, fully 99.8 percent of the 240,000 complaints came from a single conservative watchdog group - the Parents Television Council. Meanwhile last October, the Fox network was fined $1.2 million for an episode of Married By America - a program, in poor taste or not, whose primary indecency offense was an episode featuring pixilated strippers. Yet this whopping $1.2 million fine was prompted by the mere 90 complaints the FCC received in response to the broadcast.
Furthermore, when pressed by a Freedom of Information Act, a review of the complaints themselves reveals that only 23 separate individuals sent the 90 complaints. And among those 23, only three people had taken the time to compose a personal letter of complaint - the rest just sent form letters.
In an op-ed in the New York Times, FCC chairman Michael Powell defended the FCC, arguing that it is not the volume of complaints but the content of the programming that results in fines. The FCC decency guidelines, however, are far from hard and fast: indeed, they boil down to five regulators voting on whether an utterance of the word "dick" on Scrubs was meant to be "sexual or excretory" in context.
The end result is what is commonly called the chilling effect: If three dissatisfied customers out of an audience of millions can be the impetus for $1.2 million in fines, what broadcaster will ever take risks?
As distressing as the situation is, Congress continues to move in the wrong direction. Rather than pushing for mediation and clear-cut definitions of indecency, bills with strong bipartisan support before the House and Senate currently propose raising the maximum per-incident indecency fines by more than 15-fold.
While the FCC ostensibly tries to avoid the role of censors, blurry regulations and outrageous fines effectively stifle freedom of the airwaves, forcing networks to self-censor anything that could even potentially cross the line. Until something is done, look forward to a lot more vanilla programming.
Donald Tetto '06 would like to thank his roommate for watching the Super Bowl and telling him about it afterward.
