Think something ought to be done about creeping voyeurism on television? Think maybe the new administration in Washington should step in?
Imagine, for a moment, the conversation that might take place at a gathering of the Colin Powell clan. Here’s the 63-year-old secretary of state and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff talking with his 37-year-old son, Michael, a lawyer who, by virtue of his appointment this week to chair the Federal Communications Commission, is in a strong position to regulate television.
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The elder Powell walks over to the bookcase and picks up his 1995 best-seller “My American Journey.” He starts reading aloud.
“We seem to have lost our sense of shame as a society,” Powell says, reading from Page 610. “Nothing seems to embarrass us; nothing shocks us anymore. Spend time switching channels on daytime television and you will find a parade of talk shows serving up dysfunctional people whose morally vacant behavior offers the worst possible models for others.”
He’s just getting warmed up.
“We say we are appalled by the rise of sexually transmitted disease, by the wave of teenage pregnancies, by violent crime. Yet we drench ourselves in depictions of explicit sex and crime on television, in movies and in pop music. Language that I heard–and used–only on all-male Army posts is now scripted into the mouths of women, even children.”
It’s quiet for a moment, and Michael Powell shifts his weight on the couch. He pulls from the inside pocket of his coat a copy of a speech he gave in October 1999 to the Media Institute in Washington.
Reading from the text, the younger Powell begins by invoking the 1st Amendment and warns of the dangers of the government enjoying “unbridled discretion to favor, and at times direct, the content of the voices we hear and the images we see. Undoubtedly,” he goes on, “the governor that takes such liberty with the Constitution believes he does so out of benevolence, the greater good, or the `public interest.’ But this is not the covenant the people made in surrendering limited authority to the state. Benevolent or not, we did not sign away to the philosopher-king the responsibility to determine for us, like a caring parent, what messages we should and should not hear.”
As if acknowledging his father’s distress with the quality of television, the younger Powell said his defense of the 1st Amendment “is not to say that we citizens should not be outraged by violent, sexually explicit or other offensive sights and sounds. Or that we have to necessarily endure a barrage of insulting, shameless images in deference to the almighty advertising dollar. We are the customers; it is our preferences that the media must ultimately serve, and thus we must be willing as a society to exercise that power to get what we want.
“We certainly should turn off, tune out, walk away, and raise our voices when disturbed by what is peddled to us. But we should think twice before allowing the government the discretion to filter information to us as they see fit, for the king always takes his ransom.”
Now imagine Colin Powell and Michael Powell changing the subject and moving on to something a little less delicate.
End of (a) free enterprise: PhoneFree.com, the Internet-based phone company whose business was true to its name–you could make domestic phone calls from personal computers to regular phones for no charge–has pulled the plug on the verbal free lunch. The advertising-based service began offering the free phone service last summer, but the softening of the advertising market has taken the free out of the phone, and the company–as of last week–started charging 2 cents per minute.
No word yet on whether the company’s name will change.