by Bill Fancher and Jim Brown
(AgapePress) – One pro-family media critic says television has gone back on its early promise to families that it would refrain from injecting sex and violence into its programs.
Hollywood has violated the agreement its early pioneers made with the family, according to Brent Bozell, director of the Parents Television Council. He says early programmers promised its standards would not allow gratuitous sex and violence in programming if TV was allowed in America's homes.
“There was another element back in those days, an element that not only assured the program's wholesomeness, but also actually oftentimes made television a real positive force in American culture,” Bozell says. “There was right and there was wrong, and consequences were taught.”
Bozell says today's programming violates that early agreement with the family, and that those standards have nearly vanished. He also says television of the past was not the “vulgar wasteland” it has become today. He points to the increase in obscene language as proof of his claim. According to Bozell, programmers never used questionable language in the past.
“Was the product cheapened by not having it? Would it have been improved by including it?” Bozell asks. “You know the answer, and you just defined the meaning of the term 'gratuitous.'”
Bozell says obscene language was not included because it was not necessary. He and other pro-family groups maintain it is still not necessary, yet research shows it increasing at an alarming rate.
Meanwhile, Cal Thomas has a simple solution to the issue: if you think television is foul, then just get rid of it. The Christian columnist says it is too bad the Hollywood writers did not strike recently. According to Thomas, the strike might have provided “a respite from the air pollution some of them crank out.”
Thomas points to a Federal Trade Commission report last year that found the entertainment industry is targeting violent films, music, and video games to young people. He says networks might stop fouling the airwaves with such “entertainment” if Americans turn off the TV — or better yet, he says, get rid of it. He says replacing TV with dinner table conversations, meeting neighbors, reading good books, and renting old movies may help raise the standard of popular culture.
(This update courtesy of Agape Press.)
DeGeneres Returning to Prime Time on CBS
by Fred Jackson and Jody Brown
(AgapePress) – Hollywood's poster girl for homosexuality will soon be back on network television.
As reported in this space last month, lesbian actress and homosexual rights activist Ellen DeGeneres is returning to prime-time TV. CBS announce on Wednesday that DeGeneres will have her own network sitcom this fall. Called The Ellen Show, Reuters News reports it will feature DeGeneres as a successful lesbian entrepreneur who returns to her Midwestern hometown for a hero's welcome, then learns that her dot-com business has gone under. Veteran actress Cloris Leachman will play her mother.
Christian groups remember DeGeneres as the woman who made TV history in 1997 when her character on ABC's Ellen revealed she was a lesbian. That episode, which Reuters says drew 36 million viewers, demolished the last bastions of resistance to homosexuality on prime-time television. But it also marked the beginning of the end of the show after the Disney-owned network came under fire from pro-family groups. Ratings began to plummet as the show focused more and more on homosexual themes. ABC eventually cancelled the program just over a year after the “coming out” episode went on the air.
Leslie Moonves, president of CBS Television, said last fall that, unlike her failed ABC series, DeGeneres' sexual orientation would not be a focus of the new series.
