On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
OnTelevision THE BATTLE OF THE BLIP BY MARVIN KITMAN o bscenity on television is one of those things nobody talks about, but everybody does something about. When an objectionable word crops up...
...But Fred Boh-len, at that time the head of pbl, said he ordered the film cut because he didn't want the educational television stations to drop the whole show in the belief that their viewers would find the one sequence objectionable...
...The debate over "Law and Order" was followed by a literate discussion about the propriety of using the word "fuck" on television...
...Traditionally, stations resort to censorship for the protection of their listeners...
...The filmmaker's protests were not altogether in vain...
...That was because pbl, in its infinite wisdom, decided Wiseman's report had to be edited...
...There is, after all, some decent language used in the All About TV program...
...Jack White, expresi-dent of net...
...Two of the men who made the decision to censor his film happened to be sitting on the panel...
...What experimental tv fans thus heard in the two minutes on the home screen was "mother(blip)," 18 times...
...At least that's my theory...
...Seeing real people killed on real battlefields during dinner no longer makes viewers lose their appetites...
...They cut half a word 18 times...
...When an objectionable word crops up in the advance screening of a film or tape, for example, the network censor in the control room shouts: "For Chris-sake, you dumb bastards, stop the machine or it's my ass...
...It was a first in television history, a step forward in the medium's growth...
...Some may hail this decision as television's ultimate statement on censorship, an ironic commentary on its own immaturity...
...Of course, they were only naked from the waist up, and they were men...
...In the two-minute sequence (as originally filmed) the kids use the expression "motherfucker" 18 times...
...There was also an important line of dialogue about somebody raping his niece, something about 'getting on top and putting it in her.' They cut that out...
...Whenever a show is bleeped by the censors, there is a corresponding increase of sex crimes in areas within range of the station's signal, bleeping itself having become an obscenity capable of triggering impure thoughts...
...The majority of panelists agreed there was nothing wrong with such usage...
...But who is wnyc-tv trying to protect????the people of New York...
...That may happen some day, when the fcc gets a clearer picture of what obscenity is...
...An interesting experiment, showing how boring obscenity can become, was conducted in the spring at New York's municipal educational television station, wnyc-tv...
...But in the version shown on pbl, the police seem suddenly agitated, starting to bang the kids' heads against a parked car for no apparent reason...
...Without hearing the swearing," he claimed, "you don't approve of the cops' strange behavior...
...It was experimental enough to use the word "mother," but too experimental to use the second half...
...Jack White, who knew the minds of educational tv station management better than anyone, explained that he didn't like censorship, but was concerned about the affiliates' sensibilities...
...The network censors always edit the blue material from Johnny or Dino's program, but it sure wakes the audience up...
...As far as I've been able to learn, the municipal station decided not to run the All About TV installment on censorship for fear that it would lose its license...
...At recent meetings of the educational tv establishment, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (cpb) recognized this truth by lobbying for a total ban on four-letter words from public network-oriented shows, regardless of the context...
...But James Day, the president of net, explained in rebuttal to cpb that noncommercial television should be freer than commercial tv...
...Marie Greco of the Columbia School of Journalism faculty...
...One could argue that this was a militantly moderate approach to truth in tv journalism...
...If it had been played as it happened, you still may not agree with what they did...
...But tv is chronologically the youngest of the arts, and kids will be kids...
...the sound varies from network to network (some creative local stations use silence...
...But it was a step in the right direction...
...Besides, everybody knows what "mother" stands for...
...and Fred Wiseman, the filmmaker whose documentary, "Hospital," won an Emmy this year...
...This recorded a day in the life of the Kansas City Police Department, focusing on the prosaic arrest of several black kids charged with car theft...
...even the most educationally disadvantaged child in the school system knows how to spell them...
...They own the station...
...Wiseman recounted this background material during the discussion on All About TV...
...Before the show was taped, Scheuer reportedly warned the municipal station's management that the language might be rough, but it would not be used simply for shock value...
...Richard Schickel, the Life magazine critic...
...It shows the cops breaking into an apartment looking for the alleged thieves...
...After the show was finished, it was not aired...
...But at least it showed the cops had a reason to be incensed...
...This is the technique I first saw used in another art form, the cheesecake magazine...
...There's no motivation in the scene...
...The director of the station assured Scheuer that there was no subject grown-up people could not discuss on television...
...a melee follows...
...Last season nbc twice showed nudes on serious drama programs...
...If educational television opens the door there," he told a New York Times reporter, "the next thing you know we'll decide that we can't have controversy...
...This process is known as "bleeping" or "blip-ping...
...Ultimately, it is trivial for an educational station to make such a fuss over a few dirty words...
...The matter is not beyond redemption...
...You have to have the fingers of a safecracker to tune the uhf dial...
...The panel included Fred Bohlen of the Ford Foundation...
...Other city facilities, such as the sidewalks, subways and walls of buildings, regularly carry unspeakable words...
...Wiseman contended that the cuts had destroyed the impact of the scene...
...From these inebriates I have discovered what really happened at wnyc-tv...
...The best way to prepare the public for the language revolution is to begin discussing obscenity intelligently, in a mature and rational forum...
...So keep those cards and letters coming, folks...
...Television is trying to make a similar adjustment to the new morality...
...Usually hatchet men will say the film was too long...
...The show is still in the can...
...the public wasn't ready for Marilyn Monroe's pubic hair...
...After "Law and Order" was shown, the anchorman on the pbl show that night announced that cuts were made over the objection of the filmmaker...
...Television is supposed to give the public what it wants...
...The projector is then reversed for a few frames and the offensive material is electronically deleted...
...If a studio audience seems to be falling asleep, the host or one of his guests throws in a dirty word or joke...
...Prurient interest can be better doused by the panel discussion than by any other art form on the medium...
...The program used as a visual aid Wiseman's film-essay "Law and Order," parts of which appeared on the Public Broadcast Laboratory (pbl) in 1968...
...They were going to cut out a few 'Jesus Christs' and 'damns.' I yelled and screamed about those, too, and they left them in...
...A ?^ ctually, it wasn't so much a step forward as a step sideways...
...After a spate of complaints about too much violence on tv...
...A few moments later, the kids are apprehended in a back alley...
...The current rise of obscenity in the university, theater, movies, and other entertainment arts has left television far behind...
...they had to cut somewhere, so they left out the obscenities...
...Nobody connected with this brave experiment wants to talk In Coming Issues PEARL K. BELL on W. H. Auden's 'A Certain World' CARL GERSHMAN on Theodore Draper's 'The Rediscovery of Black Nationalism' about it, except at cocktail parties...
...By pushing the panic button????And missing????wnyc-tv is preventing a legitimate issue from being discussed...
...Instead, it increased its coverage of actual brutality on news shows...
...A few years back, photographers would always bring around a picture they knew the editors could never publish...
...invited a number of experts to speak frankly about television's most embarrassing problem...
...the industry stopped showing make-believe violence...
...The future for obscenity on the air has to be in the field of educational television...
...All About TV was to be the first program to tell us all about censorship...
...They also promise the policemen they will "kill a cop for them someday...
...The use of four-letter words in commercial television, however, is still largely limited to shows like Johnny Carson's and Dean Martin's...
...Steve Scheuer, the host of a talk show called All About TV...
...What he did not tell him, apparently, was that the participants in the discussion simply would not be able to use the words being discussed...
...Not that many children are in danger of being exposed to wnyc-tv, anyway...
...The medium's strength has never been presenting an accurate picture of life, only its warped view...
Vol. 53 • July 1970 • No. 15
