For the second time in three years, a major network looks like it might cave in to puritan activists who aim to cleanse prime time television of four-letter words. And just like last time, the youth are apparently at risk of being corrupted not by the violence of the fare in question, but by the nasty language the people on screen use in between bouts of violence.
The documentary in question this time, 9/11, is a fairly straightforward account of the events in Lower Manhattan that day in 2001, and contains the only known video footage of the first plane strike — shot by two French filmmakers making a documentary about New York firefighters in Lower Manhattan that morning. As you can imagine, amid the confusion and chaos, the firefighters uttered a few choice turns of phrase, and it’s this bit of history that some cultural prudes want bleeped out. What’s funny — or sad, depending how you look at it — is that the unedited documentary was previously aired twice by CBS, profanity intact and without incident, on both the six-month and one-year anniversaries of the attacks.
Even so, the American Family Association says that it has asked its 3 million members to flood the FCC and CBS with complaints if the documentary airs unedited. And in response to the threat, according to the Associated Press, “about a dozen CBS affiliates have indicated they won’t show the documentary, another dozen say they will delay it until later at night and two dozen others are considering what to do.”
These threats come just two months after President Bush, under pressure from the American Family Association and other like-minded groups, signed off on a law that will penalize broadcasters $325,000 per profanity violation, as opposed to the $32,500 penalty previously imposed.
The current flap looks to be a carbon copy of an equally ridiculous incident in 2004, when sixty-six ABC affiliates decided not to air Steven Spielberg’s WWII movie, Saving Private Ryan, on Veterans Day due to worries that the film might be deemed indecent — even though the FCC in 2002 had already ruled that it was not. ABC, too, had previously broadcast the film uncut in 2001 and 2002.
What changed after 2002? The nipple, that’s what. Ever since January 2004, when Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction” permanently jaded innocent young viewers across the land, a few organizations have waged war against broadcasters in the name of “family values.” Although this vocal minority has generated plenty of noise over the past couple of years, don’t be fooled into thinking that they represent anywhere near the majority opinion of the nation at large. Over 99 percent of the million or so complaints sent to the FCC between 2002 and 2004 came from just one conservative group, the Parents Television Council.
The greatest irony is that the FCC long ago said that it would not fine ABC affiliates that showed Saving Private Ryan because its profanity is shown in the context of a war. This logic seems to have eluded the CBS affiliates who are choosing to censor the honest reactions of a group of firefighters to the murder of more than 2,000 fellow Americans, in favor of currying favor with a vast minority who don’t seem to want too much reality to seep into their recollections of that day.
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.