Steve Allen, the urbane author and piano-playing, bon-mot-spinning entertainer was one of the closest things America had to a "popular intellectual." Before his death on Halloween, 2000, he devoted much of his time to trying to save the medium that brought him fame and that he considered redeemable. In full-page newspaper ads across the country, Allen called television a "moral sewer" and asked for help telling advertisers the shows they paid for are filled with "filth, vulgarity, coarse humor, premarital sex, violence and killings."
The Parents Television Council (PTC) in Los Angeles, still coordinates the ads and posts awebsite: www.parentstv.org. PTC monitors prime time shows for examples of sex, violence and vulgarity.
Excitingly, the site lists parent companies for products advertised on objectionable shows: If a Burger King commercial airs on a trashy show, you can send an email to the CEO of Diageo foods (corporate owners of Burger King) through the PTC website.
In 2000, a PTC campaign persuaded 31 sponsors to drop ads from "family-hour" wrestling show WWF Smackdown!, including MCI Worldcom, Ford and Procter & Gamble. Producers promised to tone down violence and profanity.
White Dot interviewed Steve Allen the summer before his death.
White Dot: How do you believe the power of television over society as a whole has changed with changes in programming?
Steve Allen: I am not sure that the power of television—which is to say its influence—has changed much in the last half-century. What has changed greatly, and largely for the worse, has been the medium’s near-abandonment of once-common standards of decency.
W.D.: Has the networks’ race-for-the-bottom caused the drop in overall viewing?
Allen: The audiences for the three major networks— NBC, CBS, and ABC—are much smaller than they used to be in the 1950’s. The viewer can click onto 40 or 50 different channels. This would have happened even if every one of the programs on the networks’ schedules were high-minded and brilliantly achieved.
W.D.: How did you begin your involvement with PTC?
Allen: I had been speaking out and writing for about fifteen years about the every-increasing wave of vulgarity that had come to dominate television. Three years ago I gave the keynote address at a Canadian television convention and took advantage of the opportunity to speak my mind about the steep erosion of standards. A copy of my remarks came to the attention of the Parents Television Council. CEO Brent Bozell pointed out that my message seemed to be the same as their own and he therefore wondered if we might effectively join forces.
I said I would be happy to speak and write under their auspices. This I have done for the past three years. At the moment I’m just finishing up a book on the problem that has finally come to be so widely addressed...
W.D.: How have advertisers reacted to PTC’s pressure?
Allen: Very reasonably, for the most part. One pattern we’ve discovered, I had not anticipated, which is that some CEO’s of the major corporations which are, of course, America’s chief advertisers literally were not aware of where their company’s commercials were being placed.
Quite a few of the corporations that the PTC has approached have withdrawn their sponsorship of offensive shows.
One hopeful note in this whole controversy is that the increasing sleaziness of popular entertainment in recent years is by no means an issue that is of importance only to conservatives or Christian fundamentalists. I know atheists, agnostics —believers and unbelievers of all kinds—who perceive the true harm being done by the morning-noon-and-night effect of exposure to television of America’s children. Many television programs send out messages that precisely contradict the lessons that parents and educators have been trying to impress on children for centuries.
As for situation comedies, children watching them must get the impression that there’s nothing the least bit questionable about having sex with casual acquaintances, making endless jokes about flatulence and masturbation or using coarse language.
It’s important to establish that we’re not talking here about a matter of taste. We’re talking about the actual psychological and moral harm done by a culture that exposes its children morning, noon and night to forms of alleged entertainment that are deliberately vulgar or violent. I’m not speaking only as a concerned citizen, but also as an outraged grandfather—of 12!
Our country’s corporate community, by itself, could solve this problem overnight if it refused to advertise on vulgar or violent shows.
Another important point is that my own voice is by no means that of a lone prophet in the wilderness. Bill Cosby for years has been strongly critical of television vulgarity, and has demonstrated, with his own shows, how to be both funny and inoffensive at the same time. Mort Sahl and Tim Conway, certainly very funny gentlemen, have recently joined the PTC. John Byner and Jonathan Winters, two of the funniest fellows on earth, have expressed their support for our aims, and there is an admirable group of young comics called Clean Comedians who, despite their youth, can see where virtue and common sense lie.
W.D.: Do you believe television can be redeemed?
Allen: Certainly, but it will require the active participation of everyone who objects to its present state. Turning off offensive shows is one thing a viewer can do. Writing civilized letters of complaint to the sponsors and studio executives involved is another. Some viewers choose to boycott products advertised on the more disgusting series. Most Americans belong to one sort of association or another, so whether your group is a church, a bowling team, a Rotary Club, or whatever, you can suggest to your organization’s officers that they formally address this increasing problem.
W.D.: Is it time to throw away TV?
Allen: I could never do that. Not only am I still appearing on television every few days—though not in recent years on my own shows—but television is too important to be abandoned or ignored.
Chemtrail Central Forum
UBBFriend: Email This Page to Someone! 
posted 02-10-2002 12:07 PM
