TV REVIEWS : ‘In Censors We Trust’ an Evenhanded Ron Reagan Report

Ron Reagan’s third report for cable’s E! Television, “In Censors We Trust” (at 8 a.m. today, 2 p.m. Thursday and 6 a.m. Saturday), offers the same kind of broad, thoughtful coverage of a difficult issue that he brought to the earlier “The Whole World Is Watching” and “See How They Run.”

Don’t think that Reagan’s stylish duds makes him a cute stand-up for the camera, and little else. As a reporter, he covers the field of the country’s on-going censorship battles, even talking with Paul Yule, the producer of “Damned in the U.S.A.,” which also documented the censor wars--and incurred the anger of Christian fundamentalist Rev. Donald Wildmon.

“In Censors We Trust” isn’t likely to encounter “Damned’s” problems, if only because it is extremely fair to every side of the debate. (Part of the wit of “Damned” was its partisan slant.) For every novelist like John Irving and columnist like Anthony Lewis arguing for, as Lewis terms it, “the freedom for the thought you hate,” there are activists like Terry Rakolta, leading boycott campaigns against sponsors of what she views as offensive TV programming, and John Evans, who writes detailed ratings of major film releases (“Glengarry Glen Ross,” he reports, used “the f-word” 133 times).

Reagan could have easily used some of this as satirical fodder; instead, he keeps his impish self in check, and has his good questions draw out some revealing answers. Asked if he’s concerned that an NC-17-rated film is unduly hamstrung in the marketplace, Motion Picture Assn. of America head Jack Valenti replies, “I didn’t make the film.” “In Living Color” creator Keenen Ivory Wayans tells Reagan that censorship is “laziness.”

Rakolta tells him that the issue is about “community standards, it’s about protection of children.” Lewis quotes John Milton: “Who is noble enough to be a censor?”

It is the question hovering over this debate, which Reagan points out again and again is not a new one in this country. Director-actress Lee Grant painfully recalls her blacklisting in Hollywood during the McCarthy era, and vivid clips of a ragged, worn Lenny Bruce show that censor battles have human costs. Reagan lays it all out, and it is only afterward that one muses that he is, after all, the son of a President whose decisions helped usher in the new era of censor wars.