The High Cost of Seeing Janet's Boob

We're all still paying the high cost of seeing Janet's boob during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, as the FCC just denied CBS's appeal and affirmed its "indecency" fine. As anyone knows who reads our stuff, we abhor the FCC's consistently inconsistent indecency fines and violations. But let's put the FCC's issues to the side and talk about CBS's issues here.

As a parent watching that Super Bowl halftime show with my then 13 year-old son, and my 8 year-old daughter wandering in and out of the room, we never actually saw Janet's breast exposed because I had already switched to another channel. Early on, the halftime "festivities" had become a crotch-grabbing graphic adolescent sex fantasy that seemed utterly inappropriate to a show watched by more families on this planet than any other. In changing channels, I was following my own advice on indecency issues: Parents should monitor what their kids watch on TV and avoid or turn off what's not appropriate. But I couldn't help wondering, "what is CBS thinking????" In a way, the halftime show's climactic (in all senses) "wardrobe malfunction" distracted from this more fundamental question: even if Janet's boob hadn't been bared, was it responsible of CBS to broadcast these graphic themes and images during the Super Bowl with no notice to America's families, leaving many feeling "ambushed" by content they considered inappropriate for their kids?

Recall that this halftime show was brought to America by two divisions of Viacom: game broadcaster CBS and half-time producer MTV. These corporate cousins had been charged by their top execs with discovering elusive "synergies" between their mis-matched media assets to demonstrate to Wall Street that the giant sums of Street money the conglomerates were lavishing on acquisitions had some actual financial benefit, and were not just being used by egomaniacal media moguls to expand their empires. So CBS turned over the production of the Super Bowl halftime show to MTV, reasoning that by "exposing" (ha ha) the huge Super Bowl audience to MTV-style entertainment, it could enlarge the MTV audience and promote the MTV brand. Voila: synergy!

Just one problem: while many Super Bowl families might not have watched MTV because they didn't know about it, there were plenty like mine that didn't watch MTV because they were all too familiar with it. And now Viacom/CBS/MTV was imposing MTV on them during the sacrosanct Super Bowl??? What were they thinking?

The Super Bowl halftime fiasco galvanized and energized the Morality Police, handing them a hugely potent "family values" issue in the middle of a presidential election campaign. Then-FCC Chairman Michael K. Powell, no doubt aware of -- or quickly made aware of -- the issue's political power, threw aside his oft-stated First Amendment-based reticence to censor television, and instead led the charge to take CBS, and by extension, Hollywood, liberals, and the other usual suspects to the Morality Woodshed. Of course, Powell, along with many other soapboxing regulators and legislators, bore much of the responsibility for the concentrating and consolidating of the media that may have reached its own climax with the disastrously synergistic CBS/MTV hookup at the Super Bowl. But that was never discussed. And now, with media synergy a discredited concept on Wall Street, CBS and MTV have split apart, no longer corporate cousins.

CBS gave me my first job in showbiz in 1982 and I've worked for them many times since, so I'm partial to them. But if I had been the CBS Czar, I'd have brought in the Corporate Damage Control Experts, apologized to America's families till I was blue in the face (which they say they've done), fired whoever green lighted this nutty halftime show idea, instantly paid the FCC fine, made millions of dollars in contributions to shelters for women who are victims of violence, and vowed that this temporary insanity would never again occur.

But the network czars have chosen to play their hand to the bitter end, now certainly heading to court to appeal the FCC's fine. I hope CBS wins. Because the answer to the problem of inappropriate content on TV is for parents to use the many tools and the abundant information available to them to monitor what their kids watch, not to have the Big Brother government play censor. But keeping the government from regulating broadcast content requires that broadcasters exercise their power and freedom on the airwaves with responsibility. I don't think CBS has ever come to grips with just how much they broke faith with many average American families who trusted the network to inform them when something they might not consider acceptable for the kids was about to air.

I'm no prude or religious wacko, and I'm quite confident my kids could have survived the halftime show unscathed had they watched it all, but I confess I was glad I had a quick finger on the remote that day. For those utterly normal and concerned American parents who weren't so quick to click, the idea of far more intrusive and unrestrained government regulation of broadcast speech suddenly became more acceptable post Super Bowl 2004. That's an utterly wrong conclusion, yet understandable in light of what happened and the network's later restrained mea culpa. With an unrestrained FCC soon able to impose exponentially increased fines for "indecency," already chilled speech on broadcast TV may enter a new Ice Age. For many years to come, we'll all continue to pay a high price for a half-second glimpse of Janet Jackson's boob.