Nature provides us with many tools for gauging the passage of time, such as crocuses to herald the arrival of spring and the harvest moon to proclaim the autumnal equinox.
Then there's the appearance of L. Brent Bozell III on every TV news program in creation, which marks the more-or-less annual arrival of the season for pontificating about indecency on TV.
The latest Bozell-a-thon was provoked by a commercial promoting a cheeseburger sold by Carl's Jr. restaurants, featuring the heiress-actress-whatever Paris Hilton.
The ad debuted about a week ago, and the sight of Hilton in a swimsuit soaping up a luxury automobile without actually using her hands (if you know what I mean, and I think you do) promptly drove Bozell bats. He appeared all over the TV dial to decry its airing during hours when children might be watching. On the "Today" show, he called it "a quantum leap down this pike where we try to scrape the bottom of the barrel," a triple-masted mixed metaphor that, grammatically speaking, would itself be regarded by most schoolteachers as scraping the bottom of the barrel.
We can stipulate that the commercial marks a new high (or low) in televised crassness. But what's really interesting is the spotlight it shines on the symbiotic relationships connecting all the players in the manufactured outrage industry.
First Bozell, a longtime conservative pundit who launched the Parents Television Council as a blue-nosed media watchdog in 1995, apparently having realized that sex on television was a fail-safe issue through which to promote a broader ideological agenda. Here's how he began a recent column ostensibly devoted to the low morals of the cable show "Sex and the City":
"They once called women the 'fairer sex,' the civilizers of men, the paragons of reticence and manners. Then along came feminism.... "
Bozell says the Los Angeles-based PTC, which purports to have 1 million members nationwide, is concerned not with ideology but with documenting a deterioration in broadcast morals that is provoking nationwide indignation.
One might question how much of this indignation really exists. There's evidence that it's largely produced by, well, the PTC. According to Federal Communications Commission statistics reported last December by the trade publication MediaWeek, more than 99% of all indecency complaints to the agency in 2003 and 2004 were generated by the organization, whose website carries a form allowing visitors to fire off a gripe to the FCC with a few mouse clicks.
