Fox on the Run

...The real world, he maintained, is not nearly the ubiquitously violent and dysfunctional place we see in the movies...

...For, of course, the pre-Chao presentations had not all gone down well...

...The really big issue-pondering began the next day...

...As to censorship, it would be far better (he argued) if networks were left alone to entertain as they saw fit...

...It is probably correct to say that, with such musings, News Corp.'s executives were enjoying a level of dialogue slightly more elevated than the nightly date-chat on "Studs...

...Rees-Mogg, for many years the editor of the London Times...

...BEEFCAKE JOEY BARES ALL...

...Although O'Sullivan granted to popular culture a certain vitality and technical prowess, neither he nor Medved sought to defend it on its own terms...

...After all, the Fox branch of dirty words—are rightly worth restricting, for they threaten the most basic desire of any parent: to form the values of his children...

...El 32 The American Spectator September 1992...

...Joe Roth, the head of Fox's movie division, heatedly defended R-rated films against Medved's attack the previous day...

...Probably without intending to, Chao drew the same straight line between popular entertainment and everyday life that Vice President Quayle drew when he pointed out what a bad example "Murphy Brown" was to single women...

...One would expect there to have been some reaction to Chao's nude surprise in the half-hour question-andanswer period that followed, but there was, well, barely a mention of it...

...In passing, Gilder mentioned that his 13year-old daughter had been in the audience for Friday's session...

...He blended his vaudeville with argument as only a television executive with a Harvard degree in classics could...

...And an editor from News of the World, a woman, asked for Iacovelli's phone number...

...His tone did not suggest approval of what she had been forced to see...

...When such entertainments are consumed in the megadoses to which we are accustomed—and the shallower the pleasure, the greater the dosage required—they are bound to have a coarsening effect...

...and Michael Medved, cohost of "Sneak Previews," a syndicated television show produced by a PBS station in Chicago...

...everyone should try to adjust to new realities...

...Even if the implicit message of Fox Television is less dangerous than that of Time-Warner's pop star Ice-T, it is only slightly less condemnable...

...He failed to see that the outrageousness for which he had been rewarded with spectacular corporate and commercial success would shock and dismay as soon as it moved from the family's living room to an auditorium filled with real people, including dignitaries, gathered to address the great issues of the day...

...Let it be said that Chao's presentation was not entirely ridiculous...

...We will have to await the movie's general release to judge whether it achieves the level of artistic seriousness it apparently aspires to...

...In addition to Chao, the participants included Mrs...

...earns Murdoch and his shareholders a profit by producing movies and television shows whose content is at odds with nearly every moral, intellectual, and aesthetic tenet that Kristol and his colleagues hold dear...

...Secretary Cheney argued, as one might expect, for maintaining a strong defense despite the Cold War's end...

...Quayle suffered ridicule for failing to recognize the supposedly crucial distinction between real life and television...

...His most notorious hit is "Studs," a late-night panel discussion in which youthful participants detail the sexual content of arranged dates, in language that can only be described as ludicrously euphemistic...

...A large, oily nude photo appears nearby, on which a small, strategically placed Chippendale bow tie has been drawn with the word CENSORED inscribed across it...

...Stephen "Studs" Chao is perhaps an especially ridiculous example of the kind of creature this deadeningly shallow entertainment culture can produce...

...To everyone's amazement, Iacovelli didn't stop once he got started...

...As he spoke, an artist's model whom Chao had hired for the occasion—a man named Marco Iacovelli—made his way to the stage and began to undress, within spitting distance of Murdoch and his wife, Anna, and the Secretary of Defense...

...If, as some have suggested, he was bravely attempting to send a message to his management corps, let us hope they were listening...

...For there is no doubt that the huge mass entertainment machines of modern American life—of which Fox is a conspicuous example—bring a great deal of pleasure to a great many people...

...Sir Charles Powell, Margaret Thatcher's former private secretary...

...Similarly, although homosexuals may appear on television as noble victims, no situation comedy would ever be built around, say, the lives of two eccentric bachelors uninterested in the opposite sex...

...Cheney...

...But we must remember that the Snowmass conference was a gathering of entertainment and media executives, men and women whose rise to the highest echelons of Murdoch's empire has not always been guided, it is safe to say, by a strict adherence to principles of gentility, intellectual rigor, and aesthetic refinement...

...Chao's idea seemed to be that there isn't an all-powerful elite that operates in a vacuum, dictating television's content...

...One cannot fault her...

...Friday morning's first session, devoted to "Geopolitics in the 1990s," was the event for which Secretary Cheney had come to Snowmass...

...And a harbinger of Iacovelli's offending performance appeared at Snowmass the night before—at the advance screening of a typical product from Fox's movie division...

...In this formulation, the pursuit of pleasure (hedonism) is not merely ignoble, coarse, and intellectually vacant...

...John O'Sullivan, editor of National Review...

...It featured the author George Gilder, who in a recent book declares the death of broadcast television as we know it and predicts a revolutionary role for interactive TV...

...He asked (rhetorically) how many members of the audience had smoked marijuana, or committed adultery—assuming, cynically perhaps, that in this day and age nearly everyone had...

...they soon understood that he was a planned part of them...

...The burden of his speech was that television's content is shaped by a constant pushand-pull among producers, advertisers, and pressure groups...

...The banner, as you might guess, announced a general heading for the conference that included, alas, the year in which it was taking place...

...Powell predicted that Europe would be less centralized than the Maastricht Treaty now suggests...

...Murdoch, it turned out, was to feel a similar distaste, but it would be directed at Stephen Chao...

...Anticipating the counter-argument that popular culture is mere entertainment—that it has no effect on the character of the public that consumes it—Medved pointed out that the basis of both television advertising and movie "product placement" contracts is precisely that these media do have a measurable—and billable—effect on their audiences...

...But there are dangers beyond a wounded sensibility...

...The American Spectator September 1992 31 ties to find a double standard...

...But his real crime was violating the code of hypocrisy that underlay Murdoch's attempts at highmindedness...

...No striptease, strictly speaking, was thereby intended...

...He then found himself thinking, slightly appalled: "They are selling things to my children...

...On the last day of the conference, when everyone had quite recovered (including Iacovelli, who could be seen serving coffee), yet another panel discussion took place, this time devoted to "The Technology of Mass Communications...

...The Hollywood clique in particular had made no secret of its irritation and displeasure...

...But otherwise the audience's remarks were devoted to expressing outrage at Kristol's "chilling" ideas about censorship and at Medved's emotional indictment of Hollywood's depiction of American life...

...With Friday's second session, the entertainment world of which "Studs"' is a part at last came into view...

...In the event, the presence of Secretary Cheney's armed bodyguards led Chao to think better of the idea...

...Kristol argued that censorship, which had been an effective guide to public morals in this country until fairly recently, was not necessarily a bad thing, especially when exercised at the local level...

...By extension we may affirm what Friday's panelists maintained: that mass entertainment—whose whole reason for being is to facilitate pleasure—implies a definable set of values even at its mindless extreme (Fox...

...The July 5 issue of that tabloid features a story with the title: "I'M THE STRIPPENDALE...

...On hand were over a hundred corporate officers from Murdoch's media conglomerate, News Corporation, and its many branches, including Sky Broadcasting, the British satellite-delivered television service...

...His first idea was to "have another man come out with a gun and shoot the naked man with a blank, whereupon fake blood would flow...

...He felt delight and fascination—until he saw his first commercial...

...In too many households, Kristol suggested, popular culture (especially television) has usurped this value-forming role...

...only partly so...

...One has to feel sympathy for Stephen Chao, the 36-year-old president 1-13of Fox Television who .1...2s, was fired by Rupert Murdoch after displaying "tremendous misjudgment" at a management conference in Snowmass, Colorado, in late June...

...What may we conclude from this paradox...

...Famously, he expressed regret at having had to "terminate his best lieutenant...

...They appeared to be in good spirits...

...O'Sullivan had expressed his concern that censorship, besides being impracticable, could be rigged to enforce a politically correct view of life...

...The net effect of all this activity, he maintained, was a de facto censorship, and he offered several examples...

...Murdoch had brought his News Corp...

...The last censoring restriction Chao put into evidence was the one that effectively banned nudity on network television...

...Perhaps, as Time magazine observed in its story on the Chao episode, "It's not what you do, it's where you do it...

...But even unexecuted, the plan demonstrates the kind of crude popular-culture mentality that Chao brought to his assignment...

...it promotes an idea of life that stands in opposition to an ethical code, a code that demands (among other things) hard work, thrift, discipline, and self-denial...

...Murdoch is considered a staunch conservative by many people—and indeed the conference's panel discussions, both weighty and controversial, would not have been possible without his concern for serious debate and his sensitivity to conservative doubts about popular culture...

...In his speech (as in his book), Gilder described a future world in which the individual—freed from the passive, dead-end television terminal he is now constrained to use—will be newly empowered to collect data, select programs, and transmit the products of his own effort...

...He is the former owner of the Village Voice, whose photo archives could easily include a bulging file labeled "nudity, male...

...More important to the collapse of Chao's career was the presence of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and his wife Lynne, who is chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities...

...That task was left to Chao, who spoke last, reading (unlike the others) from a prepared text...

...By normal standards, of course, his male-stripper gimmick was a crude theatrical gesture, a violation of decency and decorum, an embarrassing display...

...Also in the audience were editors from the Boston Herald, the London Times, and Harper-Collins (all Murdoch properties)—and, of course, Murdoch himself...

...Lynne Cheney, who served as moderator, began the session by acknowledging the terrible state of popular culture...

...Would that it had inspired a little restraint...

...But he is also the publisher of one of London's most notorious tabloids, the Sun, in which nudity is a daily feature...

...He was rumored beforehand to be nervous, feeling himself outgunned—the sole defender of "the industry" in a crowd of intellectuals who were not likely to feel any great affinity for "Studs...

...Rather, network programmers operate in a vortex of contending forces...

...A conscientious reader will learn more than she ever wanted to know about one-night stands and penile secretions, and will hear it said that women must perform "fellatio more obliquely" these days...

...To orchestrate a public display of male nudity before such a group, even by way of illustrating a point, was indeed a gross miscalculation...

...It is precisely the effortless, mindless, ignoble pleasure of popular entertainments that makes them so seductive...

...He implied that various aspects of popular culture—like the use of nomic boom—whereby what we think of as middle-class comfort has come to the majority of citizens—would spread to the non-Western world by way of India and China...

...Chao wrapped up his speech by urging that—since it is, after all, "1992...

...Even a show like "Cops," featuring real-life crime stories, must micromanage its presentation of criminals to avoid forbidden zones...

...The current issue of Mirabella, the most glamorous of Murdoch's magazine properties, features a roundtable discussion among several real-life women about their sex lives...

...He recalled his own experience of seeing a television in operation for the very first time, years ago, when it was still a novelty...

...Samantha: "He's got a butt like a toaster just ready to pop...

...he would ask, and then answer: "It's 1992...

...What is more, these forces tacitly compel a hypocritical standard...

...and Fox Inc., which includes both Twentieth Century Fox and the Fox television network...

...T he conference closed with several brief speeches...

...For one thing, that the pursuit of profit, even when conducted by people whose own values are traditional, may result in the promotion of values that are decidedly untraditional, values that are sometimes coarsening and unhealthy, and sometimes explicitly destructive of ethical conduct...

...Chao was done in by a panel discussion of a very different sort, staged for a highly unusual management conference...

...To drive home the point that, despite such loose living, a production code still operates in Hollywood, he punctuated his examples of undue restrictiveness by directing attention to a banner hoisted over the stage...

...Erich Eichman is former managing editor of the New Criterion...

...He merely displayed in real life the vulgarity that the Fox network displays almost every night on millions of television screens across America...

...and William News Corp...

...Although Murphy Brown might have a baby out of wedlock, he argued, she would never have an abortion...

...People are free, he added, to turn off the television set if what they see is not to their liking...

...Neither Medved nor John O'Sullivan—who had earlier lamented the liberal bias in network news and confirmed popular culture's tendency to undermine conventional moral assumptions—endorsed censorship as Kristol had...

...Suffice to say that the movie featured the F-word so many times that Anna Murdoch was visibly upset...

...In any case, one needn't cite Murdoch's sleazier media properSun zr LADY DI - IN THE SW...

...But the question remains: By what standard—except a double one—do you help to create an offensive thing and then condemn someone who embodies the corporate culture out of which it came...

...Fatally, he began to talk about the Dutch, who confronted their own dispute about nudity on television by showing a naked woman for a whole day, hoping to defuse the prurient power of the image by offering so much of it...

...At Snowmass, Chao found himself caught in a kind of no-man's-land between the two halves of this paradox and shot himself in the foot...

...What a fool...

...Given the assigned topic, there was surely something hazardous about the juxtaposition of these formidable thinkers and their audience...

...They appeal, in short, to base instincts and crude emotions, and to the mind hardly at all...

...For one thing, he works very hard...

...One hopes that Murdoch felt at least an uneasy awareness of his own divided impulses...

...The allusion is to Cassio in Othello...

...He argued that private barriers and voluntary arrangements—like movie-rating codes and CD warning labels—were a better way of limiting noxious content...

...The lead reads: "Here's the sight you girls have all been waiting for . . . a Chippendale without his posing pouch...

...Thus, Chao said, no white-collar criminals "of the Hebraic persuasion" appear on the show, while Asians are over- and blacks under-represented...

...And the panel's concerns were on the whole more serious than those taken up each evening on "A Current Affair," Fox's tabloid show ("Confessions of a Schoolgirl Hooker...

...if it did not all have the effect of bringing the consumer willingly to the satisfaction of his desire...

...But then, "reputation [is] oft got without merit and lost without deserving," as Iago said...

...Although we know what was seen at Friday's second session, we have until now known little about what was said...

...Chao's sin, however, was not a lapse in taste but an insistence on its continuity...

...When Chao had finished making his point, Iacovelli put his clothes back on, shirt first, and left...

...And Lord Rees-Mogg argued that the amazing postwar ecoduced Irving Kristol, whose speech did not fail to provoke...

...One can be forgiven for wondering, along with a bewildered and jobless Stephen Chao, just where these limits are drawn...

...Of the people scheduled to appear onstage, Chao was the only participant whose sensibility matched those of the media higher-ups on the other side of the podium...

...Irving Kristol, co-editor of the Public Interest...

...In any case, Chao did not attend the luncheon after Friday's now-famous second session...

...She then introChao's sin was not a lapse in taste but an insistence on its continuity...

...The day before Chao's famous prank—Thursday, June 18—the topics were fairly tame: the challenges facing multinational corporations, and the future of newspaper readership and mass advertising...

...As we have read many times by now, the subject of the panel was "the threat to democratic capitalism posed by popular culture...

...In 1988 he borrowed three billion dollars o buy the magazine (TV Guide) that tells the world definitively when it may see "Studs"—and every other trashy program now making a home for itself in television's vast cultural wasteland...

...But, he added: "There's one thing this company must make clear—that there are limits...

...Various audience members had giggled, moaned, whispered ("Get the hook...

...Newsweek reported that Murdoch "ruminated for four hours" that afternoon "with colleagues" at his Aspen ski lodge...

...It is one of the ironies of the entire Snowmass affair that these are probably not the values Murdoch himself lives by...

...B efore we heap too much blame on Murdoch, we should perhaps give him his due...

...It is true that Chao acted with an amazing combination of arrogance, naïveté, and vulgar eccentricity...

...The film, entitled Night and the City, starred Robert De Niro (as a failed boxing promoter) and Jessica Lange...

...Then Murdoch offered a summary of his own, in which he too reassured the gathering that there had been no attempt to gangup on Chao...

...I n its five years of existence, the Fox network has earned the dubious distinction of having brought television's already abysmal content to new lows, mostly by trading in coarse jokes, risque humor, sexual innuendo, and sensational news events...

...In short, it is difficult to see how Murdoch can claim the moral high ground in this affair...

...For didactic purposes, Chao asked a man to disrobe and stand onstage beside him for about thirty seconds, while Chao spoke on the dangers of censorship to an auditorium filled with senior executives and distinguished guests...

...At first, a few people shouted for him to get off the stage, thinking he was trying to disrupt the proceedings...

...More to the point, Chao was the brightest star in that part of the Murdoch galaxy illuminated by Fox Television's unique brand of mass entertainment...

...The point of this exercise would have been to confront the audience with examples of nudity and violence and then to ask which violation of decency was worse...

...The London Sunday Times, for instance, has been excerpting from the recent gossip book about Princess Diana...

...According to Liz Smith, who cites the San Francisco Examiner's follow-up report on the conference, Chao's perfor30 The American Spectator September 1992 mance was only half as dramatic as it was originally planned to be...

...For what it's worth, Chao had earlier asked Iacovelli to "simply undress as you would be doing at the end of the day...

...As it turned out, a little nervousness on Chao's part was not out of place...

...In any case, he added, the mere criticism of cultural content on moral grounds should not be confused with censorship and condemned thereby...

...Responding to a person in the audience who had compared his cultural ideas to those of Savonarola, Medved was moved to say that he was glad his young daughters had not been in the audience for Chao's presentation, a comment that elicited applause...

...Billions of dollars of capital would not go to the making of television shows, movies, and video cassettes if millions of people did not want them, nor would we live amidst so much marketing clutter (posters, print ads, celebrity profiles, talk shows, etc...

...What time is it...

...Murdoch did, of course, as did Secretary Cheney...

...and otherwise conveyed their visceral distaste for what was being said onstage by the conservative critics of their industry...

...The Snowmass audience, it should be noted, had been denied such a choice...

...Indeed, moral criticism is an essential part of a healthy cultural life...

...Luckily, a few attendees were willing to reconstruct the event after the fact...

...Reports conflict about whether Murdoch fired Chao immediately as the session broke up or huddled with advisors first and then fired him...

...And since the market in no way justifies the distortion—R-rated Movies, although The American Spectator September 1992 29 more numerous, do less well at the box office than those rated PG—some other explanation must be found for Hollywood's relentlessly vile depictions of life...

...Finally, he assumed that the president of a company that sells sleazy entertainment would be neither embarrassed nor offended by public nudity...

...It was conducted with a decorous seriousness that stood in dramatic contrast to Chao's corporate theater...

...He challenged as well the argument that popular entertainments only mirror society, without shaping it...

...One supposes that nudity's relative innocence was to be proved indisputably...

...Along the way she cited Sister Souljah's remarks on racial murder...

...Michael Medved took up Kristol's phrase to affirm that what popular culture sells is always, at some level, values as well as goods, there being no such thing as value-free viewing...

...executives to Snowmass, in part, to hear serious talks on major cultural and political questions...

...Surely Chao was operating well within the boundaries of a corporate culture that includes, alongside its prestige properties, such publications as News of the World...

...Irwin Stelzer, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the man responsible for putting together much of the conference's intellectual agenda, apologized for the panel's lack of balance, explaining that he had tried to get other people to join Chao's side of the popular-culture debate but that no one had been willing...

...Since life can be a fairly loathsome affair, it is hard to fault Murdoch or anyone else for purveying pleasure, or to begrudge him the profits of doing so...

...But not all pleasures or desires are the same, and some of the entertainments that Murdoch and his colleagues produce—not excluding Fox's movies and television shows—are of a very low kind...

...Nor is he likely to conduct his social life according to its predatory standards, nor is he likely to hope his children do...

...Fox Television and its competitors in the entertainment industry lend support to Daniel Bell's belief, articulated at length in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, that producing and consuming in modern life can result in "a hedonism that undercut[s] the very Protestant ethic which was the initial motivation or legitimation for individuals in bourgeois society...

...Chao lost his job for the same reason...

...So it is that Time-Warner executives who do not themselves believe in "cop-killing" are happy to make money off those who do...

...It is reported that Murdoch had recently 28 The American Spectator September 1992 promoted Chao to the presidency of Fox Television and Fox News precisely because Chao was so good at developing hit shows of the Fox type...

...In particular, Chao failed to realize that the crude sensibility that governs his former network's shows—shows that are sent out to millions of people every week, including lots of children—would be frowned upon by senior management as soon as it led to tasteless conduct in real life...

...His schedule surely does not permit him a leisurely half-hour at night for the viewing of "Studs...

...They are bound to blunt the finer feelings, limit the capacity for aesthetic discrimination and critical judgment, weaken the intellect's grasp of important things, and drain away the truth-seeking vitality by which one engages the more profound aspects of life, replacing it with a ravenous, pleasure-hungry stupidity...

...American classrooms, it appears, are collecting pools fouyounger versions of him...

...More relevantly, as president of the News Corporation, Fox's parent company, Murdoch is as much the parent of "Studs" as Chao...

...He was joined on the podium by Michael Cook, the Australian ambassador to the United States...

...Chao is said to have been shocked at his dismissal, and one can hardly blame him...

...Nervous laughter gave way to stunned silence...

...He merely displayed in real life the vulgarity that the Fox network displays almost every night on mil, lions of television screens across America...