Trash TV
Will Super Bowl Sleaze Prompt A Real Crackdown On All That Media Smut?
Of more consequence, FCC Chairman Michael Powell got his dander up after watching halftime with his kids. Calling what he saw a "classless, crass, and deplorable stunt," Powell announced that his agency would seek to assign blame for the incident.
Of course the backlash could be short-lived. That was certainly the case with other media shockers, like Roseanne Barr's crotch grab after singing the national anthem in 1990. Commercial interests, after all, are sure to resist efforts to change the state of the business. Says Esten Perez, a 30-year-old public relations consultant in Washington, D.C.: "I think the U.S. has to catch up with the rest of the world, for God's sake. I was thinking to myself: `Ridiculous, prudes. Who cares?' This is Janet Jackson trying to make some money. This is what these tactics are for--to get you some public relations exposure."
No doubt. Though not everyone finds that sufficient justification. "It worked for Janet Jackson, but it is really not fair to kids," says Carol Weston, author of For Teens Only: Quotes, Notes, & Advice You Can Use. "Sex is always attention getting; it becomes too easy for marketers to use and too easy for teens to realize that it will help them get attention, too."
And while the media corporations involved say they were blindsided by the Jackson incident, Rep. Doug Ose, a California Republican, expresses a disbelief shared by many. "I think it was premeditated," says Ose. "This is an event in which they tell the players what kind of socks they can wear. MTV on its Web site told people to watch the halftime show because something was going to happen that had never happened before. . . . I'm hoping the FCC will fine them to fullest extent of the law."
Other critics charge that even if media honchos didn't approve of the disrobing, their standards are too low. "MTV scripted the halftime show with [rapper] Nelly," says Jim Steyer, author of The Other Parent and CEO of Common Sense Media. The show was "deliberate strategic business behavior by Viacom, MTV, and CBS."
Many advertisers disapproved of the Timberlake/Jackson display because of its content. But others were more upset because it upstaged the most expensive, most watched ads of the year. "You cannot sell unless you entertain," says Bernice Kanner, author of The Super Bowl of Advertising: How the Commercials Won the Game. "People think . . . to be more humorous, you've got to be louder. They have forgotten the deft and subtle humor."
Still, while the Levitra ads flustered some parents, they played big with the targeted male audience. "We saw a huge increase in the traffic to our Web site after our ads ran," says Lara Chrissey, spokesperson for Bayer. How big? Two thousand percent.
The way we were. Many football fans who remember when Lucy and Ricky slept in twin beds and Jack Paar walked off his hosting job on The Tonight Show after a censor nixed a joke in which Paar used WC as an abbreviation for water closet now wonder how television came to a time when triple entendres pepper sitcom scripts.
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