James Poniewozik, The Decency Police,
Time Magazine, March 20, 2005. A year after Janet Jackson, activists and Congress are revving up their drive to clean up the airwaves. Now cable may be next. Has TV gone too far - or have its critics?
The parents television council believes that too much prime-time TV is indecent. So indecent that it never misses a show. In the group's Alexandria, Va., offices, five analysts sit at desks with a VCR, a TV and a computer. They tape every hour of prime-time network TV, and a lot of cable. CSI. The Apprentice. God help them, even Reba. And they watch. Every filthy second.
This afternoon, PTC analyst Kristine Looney is sitting in her cubicle, whose bookshelf holds volumes by Ann Coulter and G. Gordon Liddy. Headphones over her ears, hand on the remote, she is watching the March 13 episode of Crossing Jordan. Suddenly, she hits the pause button. Why? "'Damn,'" she says. "And also they were talking about drugs." Looney, 25, transcribes the quote - "Damn. The sec- ond suitcase is still out there" - and it goes into the Entertainment Tracking System (ETS), the PTC's database on more than 100,000 hours of programming. "We track even those minor swears," says Looney's supervisor, Melissa Henson, "because it's a way of tracking trends." The ETS, in the words of PTC executive director Tim Winter, logs "every incident of sexual content, violence, profanity, disrespect for authority and other negative content." The ETS analysts don't monitor premium channels, which is just as well, because an episode of Deadwood would presumably crash the system. The ETS is thoroughly indexed by theme—"Threesome," "Masturbation," "Obscene Gesture." With it, the group can detect patterns of sleaze and curses and spotlight advertisers who buy on naughty shows. It is a meticulously compiled, cross-referenced, multimegabyte Alexandria Library of smut.