Sanitizing the Small Screen

By Gerald Clarke

Procter & Gamble joins the networks' sex-and-violence critics

In the television world $1 million is not much money. But $486.3 million --that's money, a figure that commands respect from coast to coast, or more precisely, from the Burbank studios to Manhattan's Network Row. It also happens to be the amount that Procter & Gamble spent on TV advertising last year. So when P & G Chairman Owen Butler spoke out last week about what the nation's No. 1 TV advertiser thought of television, he found an interested if hardly enthusiastic audience among broadcasters. His message: P & G is listening to the critics from the New Right who complain about sex and violence on prime time, and the networks should be doing the same.

Butler was referring mainly to the Coalition for Better Television, which brings together the Rev. Donald Wildmon's National Federation for Decency and other right-wing groups like the Moral Majority. Formed last February, the coalition is headquartered in Tupelo, Miss., where Wildmon lives, and claims support from 5 million families in all 50 states.

For three months almost 4,000 coalition volunteers watched prime time and dutifully marked down examples of sex, violence and profanity. Their findings went into a computer, and next week Wildmon will disclose which shows the volunteers--and the computers--found most objectionable. Some hints are in his newsletter, which he has suitably titled NFD Informer. On the basis of last fall's programs, Revlon was declared the "least constructive" sponsor, followed by Dow Chemical, Noxell, Gulf + Western and the Beecham Group. Some of the "least constructive" shows have already been canceled because of low ratings, but among those returning are Taxi, Three's Company, Laverne & Shirley and The Dukes of Hazzard. Wildmon will do more than name offending shows, however. Some of the companies that pay for the most advertising on them will be singled out on a kind of hit list, and consumers will be urged to boycott their products for the next year.

The campaign has given both the networks and their advertisers a severe case of the jitters, and Butler's comments caused still another run to the Valium. Though he disagreed with Wildmon's methods, said Butler, he endorsed his aims: "I think the coalition is expressing some very important and broadly held views about gratuitous sex, violence and profanity. I can assure you that we are listening very carefully to what they say, and I urge you to do the same." Actually the chairman was merely reaffirming a policy that goes back to the days of radio. A $10.8 billion-a-year producer of soap and food, P&G has always been a conservative sponsor, acutely sensitive to viewer complaints.

The timing of Butler's comments delighted Wildmon. "I think it was a very good statement from a socially responsible organization," he said. Bland and self-effacing, Wildmon, 43, took up his crusade when he could not find what he thought were good programs for his own family. "Everything on the air has a message," he explains. "TV represents behavior modification, or monkey-see, monkey-do. A child sees it and it leaves an impression. But consideration, decency, honesty, fidelity, hard work--those values aren't there. If I disagree with the values that are there, can't I stop supporting the companies that put them on? Sex and violence exist, and so do going to the bathroom and vomiting. But you don't see them on TV. Where is the TV show about a modern home with decent people?"

Such remarks may cause Wildman's opponents almost to choke with anger. "Wildmon is like Hitler with his hit list," says Lee Rich, president of Lorimar, the company that produces such likely targets as Dallas, Flamingo Road and Knots Landing. "No one should tell the American public what to watch or what to do. Who is Wildmon to say he is the judge? When does it stop?" Joel Segal, a senior vice president of Manhattan's Ted Bates ad agency, was aroused enough to fault giant P & G for giving "credence and support to a bunch of radicals in Mississippi. They're putting their imprimatur on the work of people trying to impose their views on the rest of us." Ironically, even P & G might be criticized for putting sex on the air, since its high moral standards seem to go into effect only after sundown, during the prime-time hours. P & G owns and sponsors no fewer than six afternoon soap operas, which are far sexier than the evening shows.

The truth of the matter is that both the networks and the advertisers have their own little hit list, and it is prepared for them by Nielsen, which measures the size of the audience. Advertisers are not likely to stop buying commercials on Dallas. lusty as it is, so long as it remains on top. When it begins to falter in the ratings, sponsors may discover scruples and look for another series. Wildmon's coalition will probably have no influence at all on the top shows, but it may be able to claim credit for killing those series that were already ailing.

Indeed, the coalition may be able to announce a victory that was already won. The "jiggle shows," which it finds among the most offensive, seem to be on the way out anyway, and the new season will emphasize action and adventure. Angry as they are, network executives probably heard Wildmon's message even before he broadcast it. "There is a general drawing back of viewer tastes from the cutting edge of the last three years," says ABC Vice President Alfred Schneider. "We are hearing that there has been a general 'too farness' in the sexuality presented on television. " -- By Gerald Clarke.

Reported by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles

With reporting by Martha Smilgis

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