FAMILY VALUES Fighting indecency on television

A more explicit American culture doesn't make the job easy.
By BOB THOMPSON
WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON -- Aubree Rankin's work life is a cesspool of foul language, kinky sex and horrific violence. If any of those things disturb you, consider yourself warned: You might want to skip to a different story right now.
Or you can stay right here and meet Mr. Sex Toy.
Rankin is an "entertainment analyst," which is a fancy way of saying she watches television for a living. She works for the Parents Television Council, a nearly 10-year-old advocacy group that defines its mission as "bringing America's demand for positive, family-oriented television programming to the entertainment industry." The PTC wants to bring that demand to American politicians, too. The group declares itself nonpartisan, but that didn't stop executive director Tim Winter from claiming partial credit when President Bush won re-election last month.
"It's the culture, stupid," Winter said then. "Our mission was validated on Tuesday night."
PTC entertainment analysts work in a row of modest gray cubicles at the group's Alexandria office. Rankin's is the one with the "Sopranos" photo on the wall and the shrink-wrapped 'N Sync poster atop the shelves. A Kansas native in a brown corduroy dress, Rankin, 27, spends her day reviewing videotapes of her assigned shows and entering questionable material into the PTC's Entertainment Tracking System, a computerized log of televised excess.
Occasionally she gives a little snort of what could be either amusement or disapproval -- or both.
Right now she's watching an episode of "Sex and the City," currently syndicated on the cable channel TBS. Three of the main characters are on a road trip to Los Angeles, and Samantha -- "she's the slut, that's her role, she sleeps with everybody" -- is trying to pick up a guy named Garth who gives his occupation as "sex toy model."
"You wouldn't tease a girl, would you?" Samantha replies.
No, he wouldn't. He's "the No. 2 selling model in the U.S.," Garth tells Samantha proudly, and he's numero uno north of the border.
"My thing's bigger in Canada," he says.
Samantha and Garth exchange a dozen lines in this scene. Rankin hits "rewind" nine times before she can get them all down.
Complaints on the rise
What will it take for the Parents Television Council to make American television safe for children? Aubree Rankin and her colleagues have some ideas. It starts, they say, with the kind of research Rankin does, which can then be used to rally parents, pressure advertisers, lobby Congress and push the Federal Communications Commission to monitor the nation's airwaves more aggressively.
They've been pushing hard. Broadcast indecency complaints have risen dramatically, from fewer than a thousand in 2001 to more than a million this year. Major factors contributing to the increase have been Janet Jackson's breast-baring Super Bowl broadcast and the efforts of the PTC, which has generated the vast majority of non-Jackson complaints.
PTCers are not advocating censorship, they say. But they do want to turn the clock back -- using democratic means -- to a time when amoral sex and violence weren't so in-your-face.
What stands in the way of their success? Oh, not much: Just the seemingly irreversible trend that has all of American culture becoming cruder and more explicit. Then there are the passionate defenders of the First Amendment who see the Taliban when they look at groups like the PTC, and the equally passionate defenders of the free market who argue that people must want sex and violence since they sell.
Notable among the latter are the corporate behemoths that dominate the American mediascape. Think of the political and economic clout wielded by Viacom, say, or by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., and you'll begin to see what the PTC is up against.
Where it started
The Parents Television Council was the brainchild of Brent Bozell, a well-connected conservative activist who remains its president. In 1987, Bozell had launched the Media Research Center, whose mission was explicitly political. The MRC set up a "news tracking system" and set out, according to its Web site, to prove the existence of a pervasive liberal bias in the media that "undermines traditional American values."
In 1995, he started the PTC as an arm of the MRC. The two organizations still share office space in Alexandria, where the PTC's research and publications unit is based, though they're now legally separated and the PTC's official headquarters are in Los Angeles.
From the beginning, Bozell says, he insisted that "the PTC would have a different mission" from the overtly political MRC. It would be nonideological, and it would work with anyone in its crusade against entertainment sleaze.
Mention the Murdoch Problem to Bozell and he laughs, hard and long. Then he mimes banging his red-bearded head on his desk.
"Oh boy, oh boy," he says. "Wearing my Media Research Center hat, I'm thrilled with what he's doing with Fox News. Wearing my PTC hat, I'm stunned by what he's done with Fox entertainment."
But the dissonance isn't just within Bozell's modest empire. It's within the conservative movement as a whole.
"It's interesting to see the conservatives split," says Tim Winter, the PTC executive director, by which he means "social conservatism versus business and corporate conservatism."
But the PTC also joined what Bozell calls a mostly liberal-driven protest that derailed -- at least temporarily -- last year's FCC attempt to relax major media ownership rules. The proposed changes would have benefited big industry players like Murdoch, allowing them to expand the number of outlets they controlled in individual markets -- lessening the chance of community standards triumphing, in Bozell's view.
As for the politics of sleaze control: Bozell thinks the issue is still up for grabs.
Republicans may have pushed cultural issues while campaigning, but once elected, "it's the economics" has trumped "it's the culture," and they haven't delivered. "Either party could run on a platform of having society shape up and do very well," Bozell said.