Right-wing moralists launch censor war
America’s freedom of speech is under attack. Mickey Mouse and Private Ryan had better watch out, says Ros Davidson in Los Angeles
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Senator John McCain, a one-time POW in Vietnam, introduced Saving Private Ryan on Thursday. A maverick Republican and a former presidential candidate, he spent much of Thursday trying to stem the desertions. The film is nowhere near indecent, he says angrily.
Initially, only 20 stations were expected to opt out. The 1998 movie has been shown twice before on ABC, to some complaints from viewers but without TV stations baling.
Previously, regulators have permitted some programmes with swearing to be aired when the language is justified artistically by the context. According to an agreement between Spielberg and the television network ABC, the film could not be edited for artistic reasons.
Thursday’s widespread reaction worries cultural observers because of America’s constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech and because ownership of TV and radio outlets has become dramatically consolidated in recent years.
“It’s self-censorship,” says BJ Bullert, a communications scholar at the University of Washington. “There’s a climate of intimidation, especially in response to the election. It’s a new kind of cold war, and it comes from the top, from George Bush and Karl Rove.”
The national mood is different now, and not just because of the election results. “Moral values” were cited by 22% of Americans as the top issue in the November 2 vote, according to pollsters.
In September, regulators fined CBS £299,000 for the live broadcast in January in which singer Janet Jackson’s breast was bared briefly during half-time at the Super Bowl . Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” prompted accusations of immorality from conservative activists, some viewers, members of Congress and commentators.
Rove, Bush’s top political adviser, says: “I think people are concerned about the coarseness of our culture, about what they see on TV and in movies.”
Former Richard Nixon speechwriter William Safire, a columnist with The New York Times, describes it as the “social political event of the past year”. Conservative Christian groups, including the American Family Association, are also rallying against the new film Kinsey, released this weekend to critical acclaim, and starring Liam Neeson and Laura Linney.
The ideas in the film, directed by Oscar-winner Bill Condon who also made Gods And Monsters, promote pre-marital sex, which leads to abortion and Aids, claims the group Catholic Exchange.
Kinsey is a gripping and “brutally honest, uncompromising and non-judgemental” look at the controversial university researcher who revolutionised cultural attitudes towards sex in the 1940s and 1950s, said a CNN reviewer.
Robert Knight, of the curiously named Concerned Women for America, told Associated Press recently that Kinsey was akin to the notorious Nazi pseudo- scientist Dr Josef Mengele.
Knight backtracked on the comparison on Friday, but his reaction indicates the seriousness of America’s culture wars.
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