IV: Wanting it My Way in Film and Broadcasting: the demand to be entertained encounters the imperative to protect young eyes and ears

• Movie Production Code 1920
• Invention of Radio and Institution of Broadcast Networks
• Founding of the FCC -- 1934: 7 forbidden words
• Movie Ratings System 1968: MPA
• Development of Cable Television........allows expanded programming for TV
• popular adaptation of the VCR
• George Carlan?, Howard Stern and the Affinity Broadcasting case: 7 forbidden words
• TV rating system -- 1998
• V-Chip introduced in TVs --1999

For most of the last two millennia, the theater has been the dominant medium of entertainment. Only after nearly three centuries of print media (1456-1750) did novel reading emerge as a major form of entertainment. In the century since the arrival of film, technology and capital have conspired to expand the power, reach, and variety of the forms of entertainment: film, radio, the phonograph, television, video games and the World Wide Web. Grasping the enormous influence of these new media, our culture has moved toward a condition of continuous negotiation between two groups and positions: 1) those who favor unfettered expression and access: this group embraces the new entertainment media and claims the right to produce or consume entertainment texts without any restraints or filtering, except that exercised by the consumer of art and entertainment; and 2) those reformers of media who work to develop systems for controlling the production, distribution, and access to forms of mass entertainment, so the impressionable eyes and ears of the young can be protected from images and ideas said to menace public morals and community values. Because of the exuberance of the market forces forever promoting new forms of enterainment, and because of the absence of legally sanctioned government censorship, those who would protect the public against bad media and expose them to the good, have had to find ingenious new ways to censor.

Specific episodes in the struggle between expression and censorship:

• Precursor in Print Media: Novel Reading for Entertainment: In the late 17th century, authors and booksellers in Britain developed a brief, easy to read, plot centered novel that was laced with vivid sex scenes. The popularity of these novels of amorous intrigue, written by women writers Aphra Behn, Delariviere Manly and Eliza Haywood, was a scandal to the more literature traditional book culture of the day. Cultural critics worried that naive young readers would be absorbed by arousing fictions and emulate their dangerous, and morally corrupt, life narratives. In response to new reading practice, Defoe, Richardson and Fielding wrote novels that absorbed elements of the novels of amorous intrigue, at the same time that their novels turned readers toward an ethical mediation upon the dangers of erotic license and unbridled novel reading. Subsequent literary history has dubbed these three canonical authors the originators of the English novel, and deleted the earlier novels from legitimate literary history.(Watt) Several factors are crucial to the elevation of the novel out of a form of entertainment: novels, as a new literary form, are distinguished from the popular mass of "mere" fiction; novels are subjected to "serious" criticism by reviewing journals; finally, novels are included in the school curriculum and the object of specialization by scholars. (W. Warner) This transformation of entertainment into art takes many years to accomplish: it makes reading popular fiction a way to pass the time while novel reading comes to be regarded as an enlightening cultural activity.
• Censorship and expression in Hollywood: New technologies produce new and more powerfully absorptive forms of entertainment, and new rounds of anxiety about the effects of this new media upon culture. The development of film brought a remarkable visual spectacle to all, even the illiterate. Its powers of verisimilitude opened up the prospect of improving forms of entertainment. Thus, upon seeing D.W. Griffin's Birth of a Nation, Woodrow Wilson ascribed to it nothing less than the power of "writing history with lightning."(Miller,30) However cultural critics like Jane Addams, the Chicago social reformer, took note of the long lines of working people crowding into the Nicelodeons and suspected the new cinema of being addictive and debilitating. Even the grand moralistic spectacles of Cecil B. De Mille could include images calculated to arouse a prurient interest in the audience. With this shot from The Sign of the Cross, 1932, De Mille ignored the Production Code's restrictions on nudity. Notice that while the film represents a Christian about to become a martyr for her faith, the film fixes her in a posture and with (a fetching over the shoulder) glance that suggests her willingness to join in an erotic embrace with the pagan Satyr figure to whom she is bound.When the Catholic Church teamed up with local censorship boards to take control of the exhibition of the new cinema, the film industry hired Will Hays, President Harding's Postoffice master, to organize their own system of censorship and regulation. In the progressive narrative usually applied to the evolution of systems of censorship, the Production Code is usually understood to be particularly invasive (it worked with studios at every stage of film production) and proscriptive (it's offered a long list of "Don't and Be Carefuls" (Miller, 39-40), while the more benign Rating System ushered in by Jack Valenti in 1968 is described by its promoters as a viewer's guide (so parents can protect children from films not appropriate to their age) and voluntary (a producer can choose not to have their film rated). However, in fact, the implementation of both the Production Code and the Ratings System have been shaped by several global general features of the the American film industry. First, the film industry has no interest in censoring the production of whatever material can attract viewers (however sexy or violent), except in so far as self-censorship is the best way to avoid more draconian forms of federal, state and local censorship. Secondly, Hollywood censorship has never been a legal necessity, the failure to receive the production code seal of approval or a ratings letter could be so diminish the size of the available audience that it would have a force equivalent to law. But finally, whenever a certain system of censorship reaches equlibrium (naked breasts gets a movie an "R"), changes in sexual mores and the influence of foreign imports, can lead to a dissolution of the earlier concensus.
• Free radio broadcasting for entertainment: Early radio was developed as a wireless extension of the telegraph and the telephone enabling point to point confidential communication in places where wires were impractical, for example between two ships at sea during battle. The development of radio broadcasting as a means of "instantaneous collective communications" was unexpected by early radio visionaries and almost accidental (Czitrom, 71). Only over the course of the decade after WWI does radio broadcasting achieve the media primacy it was to enjoy before the advent of television in the late 1940s. Early on in the history of radio broadcasting, it was widely recognized that the unprecedented communicative power of live radio broadcasting required strict restraints upon expression: otherwise, what was to protect a child or adolescent, innocently scanning the airwaves in the privacy of their own home, from being subjected to the errant tongue of a radio announcer. In order to understand the highly circumscribed interplay between censorship and expression in this new medium, it is important to grasp those elements of the American institutionalization of radio broadcasting that assured its essentially commercial telos: a) An advertising agency receives money from a company (hereafter a "sponsor") develops or buys radio entertainment (hereafter the "show") as a vehicle for its advertisement, and rents broadcast time from a station or group of stations (hereafter the "network"). b) The broadcast station licenses a particular bandwidth for transmission from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which acts as a traffic cop preventing different transmittors from deforming each other's signals, but is quite explicitly discouraged from any active supervisory control over the content broadcast over the radio system. c) The radio audience is structured as a group of autonomous consumers who may choose to buy a high tech radio receiver and can then turn the dial to whatever free "show" he or she enjoys. Notice how the power to speak and censor have been distributed within this system. Because the advertising agency assumes the crucial medial role of translating the money of the sponsor into the ads and shows it pays the stations to broadcast, advertising's speech is primary and formative. In keeping with a longstanding American suspicion of the state, the federal government has no direct speech on radio. However, through the FCC, it guards the airwaves for those who can make money from them, and holds an ultimate power (by refusing to renew a radio license) to silence those who might use the new medium in ways it deems subversive or distasteful. The new mass audience of radio broadcasting has no powers of speech on radio; it only has the limited and negative option not to buy a radio or not to tune in a station. In such a system, censorship is indirect, and usually invisible: it consists of all those ideas and messages the controllers of the commercial medium declines to speak, or allow be spoken, because they might offend the taste or sour the mood of a significant number of the consuming audience. In the "golden age" of the 30s and 40s, the commercial structure of network radio allows it to be a self-censoring vehicle for building consent. The commercial telos of the broadcast networks helps explain the odd phenomena Europeans noticed much later in the 1960s, during the Vietnam War. While the European press carried highly critical accounts of American conduct in the war, US television reported the war in Vietnam in terms so close to the official government line, that independent observers noted this paradox: the representation of the war by a "free" press was the functional equivalent of censorship.
• The decay of network television: The successful transfer of the radio network system to television in the late 1940s worked to consolidate the new medium of television as the dominant provider of entertainment and news. More than ever a large segment of public culture--from political critique to experiemental film--found itself outside of the nation's dominant medium, television. Many decried the monopoly controlled by the three networks in the US; Newton Minow, Kennedy's appointment as chairman of the FCC sought to shake things up by characterizing television as a "vast wasteland." Foundations (like the Ford Foundation) sought to raise the quality of television by supporting the development of educational television and publicly funded televsion. But from the vantage point of the present, we can see that a succession of mutations in television technology and practice have eroded central control enjoyed thoughout the 1950s and 1960s by the networks:

1. The use by the network of video tape to record and replay television shows (begun in 195?) took television away from the live "real time" performance characteristic of theater and live radio toward becoming a medium that could be archived, replayed, and moved to commercial tape.
2. The remote control, by allowing viewers to channel surf, mute and zap, won them greater control over shows, ads and the network programing strategies.
3. The VCR offered further freedom from the network schedule, but more importantly, it also opened the home to a broad spectrum of film entertainment, much of it too violent or sexually explicit to be broadcast on network television.
4. The coming of cable produced a de facto loosening of television censorship: it allows programming for narrower segments of the audience (e.g. teens were taught to say "I want my MTV"); although the initial bribe--free television programming in exchange for a commercially mediated, ad interleaved entertainment--was withdrawn for increasing numbers of viewers, the simple fact that one pays for cable TV, transfers additional responsibility for that act of consumption from the network programmer to the viewer.
5. Yet, in the age of the proliferation of sets, and increasingly lax supervision of children by their parents, those who would censor have won a new ratings systems for television, to be used in tandem with a V-chip placed in every set. This new censorship of television screen, by labelling content and opening the set to a parent's remote control of viewing, functions as a filter of content. It is America's latest compromise between the central commercial imperative (maximum access by the media industries to American homes; maximum choice by consumers), and American values: the privileging of freedom of speech and a viseral distaste for regimes of censorship.

Factors disrupting and reforming modern systems of media censorship: From the critical elevation of the novel to the introduction of the V-chip, these systems of censorship unfold within entertainment systems sustained by the market and in the absence of official government censorship. If one looks at specific episodes in this ongoing negotitiaton, one finds that those favoring unfettered access receive support from several factors: the Anglo-American relectance to censor; the profit motive, which pushes producers to increasingly extreme forms of sex, sin and violence; and, successive mutations in the technologies that reproduce and disseminate entertainment. However, ironically, these same factors--the absence of direct censorship, the centrailty of the market, and technological innovation--have instigated new techniques for censorsing mass entertainment.