The Children are Watching
now cause not a ripple of protest
Condensed from CHICAGO TRIBUNE
BOB GREENE
MILLIONS OF FAMILIES Sat down in their living rooms one
evening last August to watch a live Madonna concert from France,
telecast on the cable network Home Box Office. Because Madonna is such a
huge international star-and because the telecast was heavily promoted
and aired in prime time on a week-end millions of children certainly
watched with their parents.What happened on all those screens was that Madonna repeatedly used the one obscene word that has been routinely barred from the public airwaves. Later in the show she writhed on a bed and simulated masturbation. She also laughingly used common street terms for male genitals.
We live in an anything-goes age, so the show's witless and purposely vulgar content was not surprising. The language itself was nothing that has not been heard in movies or on cable-TV comedy specials. The surprising thing was that so few parents called HBO to object. A spokesperson for the network said the complaints "were not by any stretch of the imagination overwhelming"-and that the Madonna concert was the highest-rated original entertainment program in the network's history. Apparently, America's parents have totally given up hope that they can control what their children are exposed to on TV.
My point isn't, really, about Madonna. Though I don't happen to find her calculated outrage particularly interesting, she is free to make her money anyway she chooses. Marginally talented singers have been packaging rebellion for decades, and it always seems to sell, especially to young people. Madonna has done a very good job marketing her product.
What is most troubling is that her product appeared in America's homes during prime time on a Sunday, and people seemed to think it was no big deal. Television, in a way that now seems quaint, was once considered almost sacred ground when it came to certain material – precisely because children were watching. But the country has been so beaten down by a lessening of public standards that obscenities can be telecast to millions of families without causing even a ripple of protest.
What of the argument that parents should just turn off the TV if they don't like the programming?
It's valid-but there was no warning before Madonna launched into her first rapid-fire round of obscenities. Although the telecast was promoted as being live, it actually was taped hours before. The network knew what it was sending out. Yet it did so without deletions or an advisory notice at the beginning of the show. This was "a creative decision," HBO says.
HBO, as a cable network, is not bound by the same restrictions placed on the over-the-air networks. But this nicety is undoubtedly lost on children who have grown up with cable TV in their homes. To them, HBO is just another stop on the dial. Those children will hear worse in their lifetimes – they probably already have. To telecast a concert like Madonna's is no longer considered particularly controversial. But to wonder publicly about the wisdom of it – to say that delivering such a performance to the nation's children is wrong that is considered controversial. To say it is wrong is to seem out of step with the rest of the world. But it is wrong. It is dead wrong.
from Chicago Tribune, August 12, 1990
Note: Why is it that the unsaved will protest and condemn such things while professing Christians are silent or even try to defend them?
