Why Has What You Watch Become Their Business?

Television run amok is trouble. Just as alarming, though, are stampeding lawmakers.

Of course, some of this is subjective, one person’s pandemonium being another’s creative freedom--a perspective that eludes intolerant moral absolutists blessed with the Gift of Knowing. Some of these are in the private sector, some more dangerously in Congress, spewing politically chic noise from Capitol Hill as part of the debate over the TV industry’s embattled program ratings system.

Confident of their righteousness, these people see much of pop entertainment--some of which you may enjoy and think swell for your family--as eroding the nation’s morality. Even a much-needed more detailed TV ratings system--one more descriptive about content that will enable viewers to make better informed decisions about what they and their families watch--would not assuage them.

They want to decide what you watch. Sorry.

Registering high on the ditz meter in that regard are the Southern Baptists who this week formally admonished the Walt Disney Co. for being--if you’re easily shocked, read no further--”gay-friendly.”

That includes granting health-care benefits to same-sex partners of company employees, having “Gay Days” at theme parks and airing on Disney-owned ABC the Ellen DeGeneres sitcom, “Ellen,” whose star and main character have come out as lesbian and had the gall not to apologize for it.

No wonder, then, that most of the 15,000 delegates to this week’s Southern Baptist convention in Dallas voted to boycott Disney and its panoramic sprawl of subsidiaries as a means of aborting this “anti-Christian and anti-family direction.” Vision impaired, they roam Disneyland and see only French kissers.

Well, cultural bullies they may be, but protesting is their right. If these zealots truly believe that Disney is anti-Christian and against families, they should do everything legally possible to bring the huge conglomerate to heel. The same rights operate for them as for Muslims, Mormons, Jews, you name it.

And it’s only proper that heading their protest arsenal is the potentially lethal economic boycott. The goal is to hit these exhibitors of “moral trash” in the pocketbook. It may not work, but if the tactic was suitable for civil rights activists battling segregation, why not, too, for the Disney bashers in Dallas and others seeking to impose their values and tastes on the multitudes, however loopy their theories? That includes Christendom’s grinning bag of bilge, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who has hit the airwaves this week in support of the protest against Disney’s “immoral ideologies.”

Even Southern Baptist leaders aren’t predicting how many of their estimated 15.6 million U.S. members will actually boycott. Perhaps just a modest percentage. Yet even if their fondest dreams were realized and support for the boycott were nearly unanimous, that still would be less than half of, say, the 36 million viewers said by Nielsen Media Research to have tuned in the April 30 “Ellen” coming-out episode.

If those 36 million had a way of boycotting the boycotters, that would be something.

Yet the ditz meter and the danger meter are not identical. At least Southern Baptists are getting uppity about content as private citizens. But the notion of tainted Congress addressing the nation’s alleged moral decay, as some of its members are doing in the TV ratings debate, is folly on a higher level. And infinitely more onerous when it comes to Big Brothers the likes of Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), who seems determined to stick government’s nose into content, if we’re to believe his public statements.

A top priority should be a more informative ratings system for entertainment programs to replace the vague one created by the TV industry last year as a prelude to the coming V-chip, a gizmo in sets that will allow parents to block out programs based on codings for sex, violence and language. Moreover, NBC and others in the industry especially resistant to more detailed program labeling should be criticized for planting their heels like 10-ton anchors. And you bet the major networks too often have thumbed their noses at large chunks of viewerdom, making questionable programming decisions and ramming in gratuitous gore and coarse behavior, almost as if encouraging a crackdown.

But c’mon.

So be it if Southern Baptists and other private citizens choose to vent at those who profit from using the public airwaves. But the specifics of program content should not be the business of government in a democratic society. Yet here comes the astonishing Lieberman, an active participant in this debate, at once raising a do-gooder banner and the specter of government intervention by repeatedly asserting that content ratings will never be sufficient. He repeatedly has indicated that, ratings notwithstanding, he wants TV to lighten its sex, violence and language that some find objectionable. That he finds objectionable.

Right or wrong, it cannot be his call to make as a U.S. senator. Talk about trampling on the spirit of the 1st Amendment. Once this line is rubbed out, what next?

Lieberman worries that program ratings will diminish viewers’ ability to lobby for content changes and will force parents “to put their V-chip where their mouth is.” So what’s the problem? Isn’t individual choice the purpose of a ratings system? To label programs for content so that viewers, empowered by V-chips, can be more knowledgeable about blocking or accepting programs on an individual basis instead of relinquishing that right to others? This is democracy in action: Everyone does his own program zapping and lets his neighbors decide for themselves.

So what’s this business about government fingers in content?

Lieberman is hardly the only lawmaker rattling a saber regarding the TV ratings issue. No one has been noisier or more threatening, in fact, than Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has promised legislative remedies if the industry cannot devise a new ratings system to satisfy its critics. If the industry does comply, however, McCain vows to “do everything in my power to actively block any legislation regarding TV ratings.” His enlightenment goes only so far, unfortunately. “I have no intention,” McCain adds, “of issuing an ultimatum to Sen. Joe Lieberman or some other congressman who may want to talk about the content of television.”

Southern Baptists and other special interest groups you can deal with. But these guys are really scary.