By David Nyhan, writer for The Boston Globe
March 1994 – Is there a massive pileup dead ahead on the information highway? Call the wreckers. Cue the EMTs. We’re getting into 500-channels-and-there’s-nothing-on territory.
Too much of TV is getting so bad, who wants to watch it any more? With every media megapoly buying any chunk of Tubeland it can, the market resembles a gold rush. What if there’s only low grade ore to be mined?
I’m talking about programming. Programming can be as good as human inventiveness can make it. Or as bad. And the bad drives out the good in TV territory. And at the end of the day, dross prevails. When the bean-counters sit down with the numbers and see how consistently quality is overwhelmed by titillation, the TV biz slides downmarket another notch.
And another, and another. How many notches will be left before we are totally below the belt in prime time? Look at this dreadful stuff they put on TV. It reeks. And each successive generation of TV execs is younger, crasser, coarser and even more vulgar than the 29-year-old he or she replaced. TV has become the landfill-of-choice for popular culture. And you let your kids watch this stuff? Are you sick?
As bad as they can be, movies in theaters do not invade your home through the TV set. But TV programming has mimicked the worst of video culture: sex, violence, sickness, immorality, indifference to suffering and even depravity. Let’s call a sick puppy a sick puppy. TV, which used to be Newton Minow’s wasteland, is now a toxic dump. It’s bad for people, especially children.
So what’s new? Everyone with any brains already knows this. I’ll tell you what’s new. What’s freshly frightening is the amount of money being poured into the finite limits of the TV market.
Large debts are taken out in the gamble that X million viewers can be persuaded—or seduced—into watching channel 499 or 387. And if the proprietors don’t get their X million, they’ll start flashing their X rating.
The huge sums involved dictate increasingly desperate tactics. Trash begets more trash. People of intelligence, wit and worldly experience—who realize how brutalizing this fare is on children—effectively withdraw from the market. They lock up their TVs or destroy them. Their kids find other things to do. The kids who turn into TV zombies are tracked into lowest common-denominator schooling.
It becomes a vicious cycle.
Does it have to be? Of course not. Here are three tools: political pressure, consumer pressure and advertiser pressure.
President Clinton flew to Hollywood, met his show-biz pals and backers, and told them off. Hollywood prides itself on being just a bit more immoral than the rest of America. And it will—until it actually begins to pay to clean up its act. Violence and sex still sell, despite Clinton’s sermonizing. Which brings us to consumer pressure.
Consumer pressure works. Ask the nation’s biggest retailer. Wal-Mart will no longer sell handguns in its stores. So the good news is that there are 2000 fewer stores where handguns can be purchased. The bad news is that still leaves 283,000 other retail outlets for handguns. And why did the place where America shops dump the handgun-on-display? Customer anxiety.
“They don’t want to be around them,” a Wal-Mart spokesman told The New York Times. OK. That’s a start. The gun got fired by Wal-Mart. Which brings us to Step 3: advertiser pressure.
Charles Ferris – a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, now a lawyer in Washington – favors what he calls “sort of the vigilante approach.” He believes in pressuring advertisers to pull sponsorship from programs that a large swath of the audience finds objectionable.
Use the market mechanism, he counsels. “Look at who’s trying to sell product. Who’s sponsoring it? People selling beer or Chevrolets don’t like controversy. They don’t want to alienate people; they want to make friends.”
A successful Boston computer tycoon who helped raise $850,000 for the Clinton-Gore campaign is applauding Clinton’s get-tough message to Hollywood.
“As with guns,” says John Cullinane, “America is losing its patience with the obsession with sex and violence in all aspects of the communications business, including news programs.”
He once bought a $500,000 30-second spot during a Super Bowl. He knows. He wants Clinton to summon America’s top CEOs to Washington, make them sit through some of the programming they sponsor and call them on the carpet, then and there.
“Effectively addressing the sex and violence issue in our electronic media would be the single most positive thing President Clinton could do in his administration.” 
