Television Censorship

The current definition of censorship is “the suppression of speech or deletion of communicative material which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to  the government or media organizations as determined by a censor”

Compared to what was considered acceptable for broadcasting on television about 50 years ago, what we have on TV now is outrageous. Take the “Dick Van Dyke” show for example, even though Rob and Laura were married, they were shown to sleep in separate twin beds. Another good example is “I Dream of Jeannie”, where it was controversial for Barbara Eden to show a her mid-drift, she was not even allowed to expose her belly-button. It almost seems archaic. “In the 50’s and 60’s broadcasters structured programming content around the “normal,” dominant, values of white, middle-class Americans.” Content such as sexuality and racism were excluded. 

Now we have soap operas and other prime time shows that practically show people having sex or people that are barely wearing enough clothing to cover certain areas. Some scenes could fit the description of soft core porn. I’m not trying to bash television content, on the contrary I find a good portion of it is pretty entertaining. Our values as a society have changed since then. We are not as strict as we used to be. For example, it is no longer socially unacceptable to live with or have sex with someone before marriage. Likewise, that is reflected in our television content. In general television programs that contain sex and/or violence get high ratings.  

Despite these blatant changes, we still find the need to censor certain language on television.  Actors are not allowed to say  words such as damn, bastard, bitch, a$$ and so forth. In 2001 there was a breakthrough in this language censorship. The South Park episode “It Hits the Fan” featured the uncensored use of the word  ”**it” 162 separate times on television, it had a counter in the corner of the screen showing how many times the word was uttered. Obviously we can’t prevent the use of all “inappropriate” language on television, so why do we try? We say we want to protect our children from being exposed to such language when more than likely they’ve already heard the same “bad” words uttered by a family member. Who knows what we’ll be watching on television in 50 or even 25 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorshiphttp://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/C/htmlC/censorship/censorship.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Hits_the_Fan

This entry was posted on 17. June 2009 at 08:14 and is filed under Introduction to Sociology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.