Nearly a decade ago, in an endearingly inept campaign to counter his Entertainment Tonight anchorguy blandsomeness, John Tesh embellished a series of magazine articles with casual expletives and weird, crude asides. “Well, [fatherhood] hasn’t helped with the sex life,” he told GQ in August 1995. “I get no time on the breasts anymore, ’cause the baby’s always there.” That December he got even freakier in a People magazine interview, detailing a vivid fantasy that tickled his cortex during concerts, as he played bombastic background music for thousands of fans: “It is like I’ve taken my penis and laid it on the piano and there’s a big chopper right there…”
Now, however, Tesh hosts a radio show that’s marketed as an upbeat source of “intelligence for your life,” and public castration fantasies are decidedly not a part of the mix. Instead, he promises to make listeners “smarter, healthier, better at everything” they do by playing old Celine Dion ballads and making observations like “Getting your boss to see things your way can sometimes be tough.” For people who find the “For Dummies” books too literary, the John Tesh Radio Show is a winning blend of homiletic soundbites and hackneyed pop, and as an added bonus, it’s kid-friendly too. At the beginning of every show, the daughter who once stole breast-time from Tesh now robs him of airtime. “If a nine-year-old can’t listen to it,” she promises, “you won’t hear it on this radio program.”
Unfailingly upright, vigorously inoffensive, Tesh’s daily radio assault is part of a riptide of decency that threatens to drown us all. Broadcast and cable TV, slick magazines, radio, and, of course, the dangerously unregulated Internet have become unwitting handmaidens to legions of do-gooders intent on disseminating inspirational news items, fiery sermons, and poorly acted TV dramas in which cute kids and aged curmudgeons alike learn Important Life Lessons. But while grim crotch cops and shrill hand-wringers portend imminent cultural annihilation in every publicly aired fart joke, the decency explosion goes virtually unnoticed.
Take, for example, Pax-TV, which, according to founder Lowell Paxson, uses “storytelling and parables” to deliver the message “that there is a higher power intervening in our lives.” Launched six years ago, it now reaches ninety-five million American households, or eighty-nine percent of the viewing public. The Trinity Broadcasting Network, which bills itself as “the world’s largest religious network and America’s most watched faith channel,” is available in ninety million U.S. households. Along with faith-based networks like EWTN, CBN, the Word Network, the Church Channel, and numerous others, secular entities like the ABC Family Channel, the Disney Channel, and Nickelodeon provide hours upon hours of wholesome fare. 7th Heaven and Joan of Arcadia are current network hits; old favorite Touched by an Angel has achieved immortality in the afterlife of syndication. Money magazine reports that religious radio group Salem Communications is the nation’s third-largest major-market radio network. American Family Radio, founded in 1987 by professional vice-hunter Donald Wildmon, operates more than two hundred stations. According to radio consultant Bryan Farrish, who maintains an industry website called Radio-media.com, approximately 1,900 religious stations are currently broadcasting in the U.S.
At some point you have to ask: How much decency is too much? A small dose of Tesh is like aural Prozac. His soothing baritone refreshes; his sunny optimism uplifts; his easygoing rectitude inspires. But the John Tesh Radio Show goes on for a full five hours! And some radio stations actually air the show from 7 p.m. to midnight, then immediately repeat it from midnight until 5 a.m. Scientists have yet to subject lab monkeys (or children) to such massive quantities of Tesh, but when they do, you can be sure those lab monkeys (and children) are not going to get smarter, healthier, and better at everything they do. Instead, they’ll be chewing each others’ ears off and flinging feces at their captors. Surely, our lab monkeys (and our children) deserve a better fate than this—yet where are the efforts to regulate decency?
Rather than address the obvious dangers of Tesh saturation, federal lawmakers remain hopelessly fixated on Janet Jackson’s weaponized nipple and Howard Stern’s sleazy radio banter. To protect America from such evils, they insist, stronger indecency laws are required. But indecency laws are already quite strong; indeed, both obscenity laws and indecency laws criminalize content that describes sexual or excretory organs or activities in a “patently offensive” manner. But a prosecutor who files an obscenity charge against you still has to convince a jury that you’re guilty—and you can appeal an obscenity conviction to a higher court. On the other hand, if the FCC charges you with indecency, that’s it—you’re guilty, no jury required. And you can only appeal an indecency violation to the FCC itself.
Luckily, the FCC’s power only extends so far. Broadcast radio and broadcast TV rely upon public airwaves to deliver their programming, and because of this fact, they fall under the FCC’s domain. As part of the deal for using the airwaves, broadcasters agree to forfeit some of the free-speech protections that more private mediums like books, newspapers, and DVDs enjoy. For decades, this gave the FCC a great degree of power over electronic media, but that power is diminishing with the increasing popularity of cable TV, the Internet, satellite TV, and satellite radio, none of which are currently under FCC control.
Thus, those few seconds of Super Bowl micro-nudity could not have come at a more opportune time; they gave the FCC its best chance in years to make a case for reinforcing its authority. Currently its allies in Congress are trying to strengthen the FCC via the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2004, which would increase the maximum fine for a single act of indecency to a half-million dollars. Even more alarming are the FCC’s efforts to popularize the idea that cable and satellite broadcasting should also be under its thumb, because even though they’re subscription services delivered via privately maintained hardware, they do sometimes use the public spectrum in their delivery processes. This amounts to a pretty audacious land grab from an organization heading toward irrelevance, but if the FCC pulls its off, then MTV, Comedy Central, and perhaps even HBO and pay-per-view porn could become subject to the same regulations as broadcast radio and TV.
Then, of course, the FCC would really have some indecency to combat. Right now, it’s difficult to find objectionable material in the two mediums over which it presides. Yes, there’s Howard Stern, the favorite whipping boy of every family-values firebrand, but his show is currently carried by fewer than forty radio stations nationwide. (In contrast, Tesh can be heard on more than one hundred and fifty.) And beyond Stern and a handful of Stern imitators, several of whom have been fired in recent months, what else is out there?
Already it’s apparent how quickly an amplified FCC enforcement effort could devolve in scary farce. In March, before the Senate had even considered the Broadcasting Indecency Enforcement Act, radio stations were already flinching at the mere possibility of $500,000 fines. In Cleveland, WNCX pulled the Steve Miller Band’s “Jet Airliner” from its rotation because it contained the lyric “funky shit goin’ down in the city.” In Los Angeles, public radio station KCRW took similar precautionary measures by firing longtime contributor Sandra Tsing Loh after she and her engineer forgot to bleep a single F-word out of a pre-recorded piece.
Some pundits maintain that WNCX and KCRW have wildly overreacted to a threat that isn’t there. The FCC itself, however, has enthusiastically legitimized their para
noia by declaring open season on “lone expletives,” which are now subject to “significant penalties.” That’s because in addition to indecency, the FCC also has the power to penalize “profanity,” which it defines, in part, as the “F-word” and those words (or variants thereof) that are as highly offensive as the “F-word.”
What’s the average citizen to make of all this? Prepare yourself for lots and lots of Tesh (unless he starts talking about amputating his penis again). And drop to your knees and pray that cable TV, satellite TV and radio, and the Internet remain free from FCC regulation. Because really, how much enforced propriety can one freedom-loving nation stand? Already, there’s a surfeit of decency. While Pax-TV is available in ninety-five million households, it has attracted more than three million actual viewers on only two occasions during its six-year history. To make ends meet, it airs infomercials for hours each day.
Meanwhile, by embracing nudity, sex, profanity, and violence—which is to say, everything the FCC aspires to eliminate—HBO has netted an estimated twenty-seven million paying subscribers. And that’s the beauty of our current media age: There’s decency for the pious, trash for coarser sorts, and plenty of squeaky-clean fare for the kids. Blessed with such abundance, we all should be celebrating. Instead, the FCC and its allies broadcast a clear, condescending, and cynical message: if allowed to make your own choices, they believe, you will invariably choose sleaze over rectitude, fart jokes over sermons, Stern over Tesh. And only by fining indecency out of existence can decency triumph.
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