Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
BuzzFeed News / Getty Images
An image of Lady Gaga straddling a recumbent Finn Wittrock in an episode of American Horror Story: Hotel was paused on the screen as Enrique, an analyst for the Parents Television Council, read his straightforward description aloud: “‘The countess and Valentino are shown having sex. She is completely naked except for two star-shaped pasties covering her breasts. She is shown sitting on top of him during sex and her bare butt is shown.’” Quoting the dialogue in his notes, he mumbled quickly, “‘I forgot how good you feel inside me.’”
From his cubicle in the nonprofit’s Los Angeles headquarters, Enrique (who requested that his last name be withheld because the PTC occasionally receives threats) was demonstrating the Entertainment Tracking System, the tool the PTC uses to monitor sex and violence on television. He clicked on the drop-down menu for the former and flatly read off the list of options: “‘Anal, bestiality, anatomical reference, double entendre, erection, fetish.’ Anything that comes up, we have a subtopic for it.”
Categories aren’t limited to sex and violence: Bad language is also logged, and they have “all the variations of the words,” Enrique said, including a category for curse words that are bleeped or muted. “Slang comes up a lot that represents certain curse words but don't actually fall under the traditional curse word. … Frick, frickin’, shizz is said now instead of sh-” — he stuttered — “shit.”
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The council's VHS library.
Ariane Lange / BuzzFeed News
The PTC’s four full-time TV analysts watch, record, and archive all primetime broadcast television — 8 to 11 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 7 to 11 p.m. on Sundays — as well as some cable shows, and track their findings. A dark side room in their slick skyscraper office houses huge stacks of DVRs and servers. Another room is taken up by dozens of boxes of VHS tapes of TV shows from their pre-digital days, which represent about half of a catalogued library that comprises tens of thousands of hours of footage, all in the effort to track television’s moral transgressions
“Howard Stern once referred to us as some organization which is an angry mom and a notepad,” Tim Winter, president of the PTC, told BuzzFeed News from their headquarters. “It’s like, ‘No, it’s more than an angry mom with a notepad.’”
But many have accused the PTC of worse. At a 2014 press conference, Stern actually referred to the PTC as “some guy sitting in his basement calling [himself the] Parent Television Council” and proposed that it was “a money-raising racket.” In 2013, Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane told The Advocate that the PTC was made up of “literally terrible human beings” and likened them to Adolf Hitler. “They can all suck my dick as far as I’m concerned,” he concluded. In 2007, Time critic James Poniewozik dismissed them as “decency bean counters,” and in 1997, Brian Lambert wrote in his column in the St. Paul Pioneer Press that they were no regular watchdogs but rather “strange-looking curs with specks of foam at the corners of their mouths.”
The council inspires these comments by advocating for less sex, violence, and profanity on TV. Their work includes monitoring and analysis for their own regularly released studies, lobbying the Federal Communications Commission and advertisers, and helping dismayed viewers file their own complaints. In the 1990s, they advocated for the voluntary reinstatement of the Family Hour, a short-lived television “child-safety zone” policy that a federal court had already struck down in 1976. Another of the council’s initial objectives was a return to the moral model of television in the ’50s, a decade when standards were so prim that I Love Lucy’s eponymous star was famously described as “expecting” in order to avoid the salacious connotations of “pregnant.” In the expanded media landscape of 2016, where hardcore pornography has never been easier to find by sheer accident, it can be hard to fathom what an organization like the PTC has to offer, and even how an organization like the PTC continues to exist.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.