Righteous Watcher of the Airwaves

The leader of the Coalition for Better Television is an unprepossessing man. Slight and balding, the Rev. Donald Wildmon, 43, was born in Dumas, Miss., was ordained a Methodist minister and for 20 years preached to congregations in his home state. Wildmon has been a doer all along: he is the author of inspirational tracts (Treasured Thoughts, Graduation Gold, and 15 other books). He and his wife run a side business: leading tourist junkets to the Holy Land.

Nearly five years ago, Wildmon experienced a prime-time epiphany: one viewing night he could find nothing but sexual innuendo, profanity and violence on television. He was shocked into starting the National Federation for Decency, which in February became a member organization of the Coalition for Better Television. In 1977 he gave up his ministry in a suburban Memphis congregation to work full time for untainted television. He operates out of a dog eared three-room office in an unprosperous quarter of midtown Tupelo, Miss., assisted by a staff of two. The office contains one color TV set, with a video tape recorder attached.

Despite his hardball attitude toward sponsors of offensive TV shows, Wildmon coats his censoriousness in down-home congeniality. "People say I don't like sex," Wildmon joshed to TIME Correspondent Robert Wurmstedt last week. "But look, I got four kids. You don't get four kids by picking blackberries." Wildmon was less amiable when asked whether he was simply a puppet of the Moral Majority. "I'm not a member of Moral Majority," he insisted. "I'm not going to get into personalities or politics. All I'm talking about is television."

"I believe certain things would be best for society," Wildmon says of his social evangelism. "Television should be morereflective of real life. The values you see on TV are Hollywood values. That does not represent the values of middle America."

Wildmon, a fan of the old Columbo show, asserts that he is tolerant of a little televised sexuality here, a bit of violence there. "I agree to leaving some of it on. Some of it is real life and has been on since the 1960s. I'm not saying other values should not exist or that I want to try to beat them to death with a club. Life is never going to be cleansed."

Wildmon says he would welcome strange bedfellows. "If the A.C.L.U. wanted to cooperate with us in this television area," he says, "I'd be tickled to death." His rationale for the sponsor boycott is simple: "The clearest expression of the First Amendment is the right of a person to spend his money where he so desires. The networks can show what they want. Sponsors can sponsor what they want. It's the marketplace taking care of itself."

"To the networks," Wildmon brags, "I have committed the unforgivable sin--I have been effective." Another alleged Wildmon sin is unscientific program-monitoring techniques used by the coalition to determine smut on the tube. Admits Wildmon "It's difficult to find monitors. Our people are basically honest. I don't say they don't make mistakes." To the charge that his data-gatherers have a built-in bias, he replies: "We never ask for a monitor's political or religious views. But it's probably correct that most of them are conservative Christian people." Why will he not reveal a single monitor's name? For fear they will be exploited, he answers. "They are plain, common people and don't understand the media."

"I'm just a Mississippi country preacher," Wildmon says, with slightly mock ingenuousness, "and all I want to do is sit down and watch TV with my family.The trouble with television is that one episode of a program will begood and the next episode rotten to the core."

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