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WEEK FIVE

Introduction of Media Ethics

How much of an impact does the work of film and television creators have on our society and on societies abroad?
How important is it to the world?

The American family has lost much of its ability to stabilize society
Our educational system is also deeply flawed, mired in bureaucratic morass and awash in senseless violence
The entertainment industry has become the new national institution
Theaters have, in a sense, replaced the village green.

More American homes have TV sets than indoor plumbing!
Researchers find that the average four-year-old spends about 70 times as much time watching TV as they spend with Dad (35 hours a week compared to 30 minutes)

Whatever succeeds commercially in entertainment tends in some way to reflect the social and moral tides and helps to define the national mood

Television, too, provides societal bonding through common experience.
A huge percentage of the population of the world watches the Super Bowl.

Does what we see on television factor into our cultural image through shared experience?

The aim of entertainment is to engage our emotions rather than our minds.
Successful entertainment makes us feel something that results in some kind of pleasure for the moment:
The enjoyment of a good laugh, or a good cry, or of having been scared out of our wits.

That doesn't mean it leaves no intellectual residue. All stories communicate values and portray styles, so every movie and TV program, however inane, may make some mark on minds
Even prompting imitative behavior, especially when the images are cumulative.

Pure entertainment may not mean to teach, but it does inevitably through the myths produced by repeated example.

The reality is that media creators have become "educators," or at the very least, strong influences, particularly on young people.
Children, especially, spend a very large percentage of their time planted in front of the TV, more time, actually, than they spend in school at certain ages

Is this immersion into media culture a uniquely American?
Movies and television produced here are seen in most of the more than 190 separate nations
Entertainment has become the leading export industry of the United States, having surpassed the aeronautics and aerospace industry

According to Mark Gill, former president of Miramax , some 86 percent of tickets sold around the world are to American movies.
More people form their perceptions and opinions of the United States from entertainment than from any other source.

Hollywood movies were America's most cost-effective goodwill ambassadors to the world.
Often eccentric, endearing, and even inspiring, American screwball comedies, madcap romances, and dramas of uplifting idealism helped see audiences through the dispiriting Great Depression

Young people in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East imitate the styles, attitudes, values, and behavior patterns depicted by Hollywood, creating a breach with their own cultural norms and the established domestic order.

In Iran, where Islamic fundamentalism imposes black shroud like costumes (chadors) as regulation female attire, girls and young women have taken to wearing miniskirts under them and also, clandestinely, to watching American television shows pulled in by illegal satellite dishes

American movies predominate in the theaters, and the commercial TV networks buy virtually every program produced in Hollywood and usually drub the all-Canadian public service network, the CBC, in the ratings

"(W)e Europeans can seem at times to harbor either, at worst, a resentment of American economic success, or, at best, a mild suspicion of things American. And we are eternally neurotic about the pervasive influence of jeans, sneakers, baseball caps and hamburgers, a neuroticism that in France extends to a national debate over whether the word 'hotdog' should make it into the French dictionary."

Cultural "pollution” is one of the principal reasons why many countries resent the United States, and why these sentiments are on the rise. Protectionism in foreign film and television industries all over the world, designed to restrict the import of U.S. programming
It wasn’t always this way; American cinema used to have a reverent cult particularly among the French.

They say our movies have changed.

“America of yesteryear's cinema was often judged to be endearing and inspiring, the image projected nowadays is often perceived abroad as one of "superheroes, crime, sleaze and a nation at war with itself”

Tom Hutchinson

“Our movie industry has no sense of social concern to go with its worldwide power and influence
This seems to bespeak an imperial arrogance and hubris that can only be resented around the world.”

A scary image of America as the new decadent Rome, a society governed "by bread and circuses, with a booming economy and the unprecedentedly invasive and influential entertainment industry distracting the electorate.”

Europeans tend to perceive us as a decadent breed spinning out of control.
In listening to our foreign critics they may often be pushing a more diffuse agenda.
Their criticism of our popular culture can get mixed up with bruised national egos and other chauvinistic grievances

Ideally, the entertainment media, our unofficial ambassadors to the world, should just naturally reflect the virtues of a free and open society

Through the media, American culture invades other cultures to an almost ridiculous degree.
For example, the natives inhabiting the jungles in Peru, at the upper reaches of the Amazon River, see Baywatch on blaring old televisions when they come to town

Baywatch is seen in some 144 countries, generating revenues in excess of $100 million per year, with approximately 70 percent of that revenue coming from foreign markets.
This creates a desire for material things and for a life that is not remotely possible where many of these viewers live.

Should Hollywood have to exercise care as to the messages, intended or inadvertent, sent into the world embedded in its product?

This all sounds like more than many film and television creators signed up for when they chose to enter the field: “We are not teachers, we are artists”

Anti-Americanism that simmers in many parts of the world, is fed continually by the distorted images of us projected on the screen by our dazzlingly brilliant creators of motion pictures and television.
We have become the "bad guy" on the block.
We are wielding an ever more powerful cultural weapon—a big stick with immense global impact. We are also projecting a picture of America in our programming by which the world judges us.

Is our entertainment truly representing an American culture we want the rest of the world to judge us by?
They are.

If we agree to an ethical code, that means content restriction, right? If we couldn't portray violence, would we have a powerful film like Saving Private Ryan?
We should think about the ways in which we portray violence
Ryan is extremely violent, yes, but the violence is not gratuitous.

Do you agree that in order for violence in the media to have real impact, you have to keep looking for ways to "up the stakes,” presenting violence in new and ever "bigger" ways?

At some point, as you keep ratcheting up the violence, it takes over the story, it becomes the principal thing the audience is waiting and watching for.
Do you want to be judged for special effects or for your abilities as a storyteller?
Media images do not "make" viewers "do" anything. The studies aren‘t conclusive.
Just because they portray or even glorify violence does not mean that the audience is going to leave the theater and start murdering innocent bystanders.

Hollywood product is regarded by many abroad as junk entertainment
In important markets like Canada, France, German and the UK, our films are most resented for the psychological dangers they are thought to pose
Movies make violence an easy solution, a reflexive norm, even a way of life.

Some stereotyping can be helpful in pegging characters quickly.
However, stereotypes that play to the viewer's baser instincts and prejudices can be harmful to the individual psyche and to society as a whole.

Foreign objections to our cinema culture also cite the way Hollywood commonly stereotypes race and gender
Hollywood's seemingly morbid obsession with violence really rings the alarm bells abroad.
The action for actions’ sake, the gratuitous mayhem

They can persuade like few other mediums
No one ever characterized D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, with its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan, as only a movie. When a motion picture means to persuade or inspire, or promote hate, it can do that with extraordinary force.

Les Brown

Filmmakers, when considering the ethical aspects of their work, might ask "What messages do I want to send? To discourage? What behaviors and attitudes am I fostering to society's benefit? To its detriment?”
We must realize that it is never "only a movie."

Why "ethics?"
Some might say that Ethics stifle creativity, and have no place in the world of art. They keep creators from pushing the edge of the envelope, and developing into unique voices. They hew off the rough edges of new creation, so necessary for growth.

Ethics in and of themselves do not stifle creativity. If you know an ethical choice when you see one, it can vastly increase your power to develop your art. If "the unexamined life is not worth living," arguably, the unexamined creation may not be worth creating.

Also, arguably, the most dynamic artistic growth comes from an attempt at a true understanding of the human condition and from trying to better that condition, whether by support or criticism, and not from nihilistic negativity.

Don’t stifle my freedom of expression with ethics.
We're trying to enhance your creativity by giving you a new tool.
Virtually everything you do as a creator of film, television, and games involves some ethical choice, it can open up new avenues for you.

Make ethical choices to try and change the system. Media, and all art for that matter, should exist to teach, entertain, spark and spread ideas, even anger or enrage, but NOT principally to sell advertising and make money
The purpose of ethics is not to reinforce the status quo.

Examining the underlying meaning and effects of our work will inevitably prove beneficial
It is a matter for debate whether media reflects society or leads it. We would argue that the answer is a combination of the two.

It is a privilege granted you by a document that set up our political system. That document, and a driving reason for the founding of this nation was to create a society where members respect the rights of others.

Many people also take much of their self-image from the media
We begin to measure ourselves against the ideals in clothes, money, apartments, relationships, and attitudes we are being shown.
With influence comes a certain responsibility to stop and think about what we are doing

WEEK 5:

Censorship and the Media

Free Expression in Hollywood: First Amendment & Censorship

Ted Pease is a professor and the head of the Communications Department at Utah State University

Past associate director of the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University

There is a collision between free expression and what many people see as a growing need to monitor and regulate movies, television, and the Internet.
People are calling for morality, accountability, regulation, and self-restraint
They want "good taste" and decorum

The First Amendment guarantees four critical freedoms that define a line separating the tyranny of the many from the rights of the individual

We can:

(1) think and believe what we like and observe those beliefs as we wish

(2) express what we believe, in spoken or written word, or in newspapers, film, theater, television, or any other means of communication

(3) get together with other people to talk about those beliefs, or anything else;

(4) complain to government leaders if we have a gripe, without getting in trouble for it, and expect solutions.

Where does a single person‘s freedoms end when they infringe on someone else?

In 1456, Johann Gutenberg changed the world: By inventing the printing press.
He made knowledge accessible to the many instead of just to the powerful.
Martin Luther used the new printing technology to challenge the Church of Rome
He was excommunicated in 1520, but Protestantism was on the map.

The last time we had "new media," before the Internet and multimedia, it was television
After World War II. Concerns began to crop up immediately.

Television will enormously enlarge the eye's range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. We will forget the primary and the near in favor of the distant and the remote....
Today they peer beyond the seven seas, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.... We shall stand or fall by television—of that I am quite certain.

The "moving picture"—revolutionized American society.
"Entertainment films quickly transcended ethnic, class, religious, and political lines to become the dominant institution of popular culture”

Gregory D. Black

In New York City alone nickelodeons pulled in some 200,000 people a day, and as many as 2 million nationally
Harper's Weekly called it a nationwide nickel delirium
Sound familiar?

“Unless the law steps in and does for moving picture shows what it has done for meat inspection and pure food, the cinematograph will continue to inject into our social order an element of degrading principle. The only way that the people, and especially the children, can be safeguarded from the influence of evil pictures is by the careful regulation”

YMCA official 1909

The response to the advent of cinema in the first decade of the 1900s was censorship and regulation
The inclination—then as now—was to "protect" society from the perceived excesses of unbridled self-expression

The monitoring then licensing movies began in 1908
A national Motion Picture censorship board was formed in NY
Moviemakers challenged the constitutionality of licensing and censorship in 1915
They argued to the U.S. Supreme Court that movies were part of the press and entitled to the same protections

The Supreme Court, including the liberal Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, unanimously disagreed; said they were a product and not entitled to the same protection.

In 1900s, the issue was resolved; themotion picture industry responded to public outcry by cooperating with oversight boards, such as the Industry Board Of Censors
The movie industry hoped the National Board of Review (NBR) would halt the proliferation of censorship bodies in every community in the land

It didn't work. Movies such as The Birth of a Nation, perhaps the most heavily censored film in history, still outraged critics
Audiences disagreed—the film stood, until the 1980s, as the top-grossing movie of all time, earning about $60 million in 1915 dollars, which would amount to about half a billion dollars today

In 1922, Hollywood Movie producers, fearful of more draconian measures against them, elected to create a trade association, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA)
The "squeaky-clean” front man to represent the industry was the chairman of the Republican National Committee Will Hays from Indiana.

In the late 1920s, a group of Chicago Catholics with “a Catholic movie code” ... a fascinating combination of Catholic theology, conservative politics and pop psychology that controlled the content of Hollywood films for three decades.

"The Code states the considerations which good taste and community values make necessary in this universal form of entertainment; respect for law, respect for every religion, respect for every race, and respect for every nation." Hays said in 1934

Mae West, whose sultriest and sexiest films, She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel came out during this period.
"Mae West single-handed created the Legion of Decency, which was single-handedly created to fight Mae West”

film historian Nat Segalof

It is clear that Hollywood had a problem with Breen
In 1939, Gone With the Wind made various kinds of movie history.
Rhett Butler's one-liner to Scarlett O'Hara “Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn”

Other "subversive" and "immoral" films glorifying sex and drugs slipped through: Reefer Madness, Howard Hughes' production of Jane Russell (and her controversial cleavage) in The Outlaw
World War II provided other grounds for censorship national security and American morale. Showing American soldiers dead or injured was forbidden- and now?

With the beginning of the Cold War, censorship took a new form
Hollywood was scrutinized not so much for immorality and indecency, but on grounds of patriotism
U.S. Rep. J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey (with colleague Richard M. Nixon at his side), the HUAC went hunting Communist sympathizers in Hollywood in the late 1940s

The MPAA was the successor organization to MPPDA
The end of the era of big Hollywood studios had reduced the ability of something like the Hays Office to control content, the Production Code was officially still on the books.
Jack Valenti, the president of the Motion Picture Association in 1966, downplayed the code

In 1960s movies had slipped, and television had taken over
Television's wholesome Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best appealed to entire families
In order to attract teenagers and young adults, the studios tried sexier fare grittier, riskier, more violent that the TV networks couldn't or wouldn't.

The Television Code of the National Association of Broadcasters ,
(Knocked out by a federal court judge in 1982 on antitrust grounds)
Set the industry's guidelines for good practices, which included prohibitions against profanity, smut, and representations of sex crimes and sex abnormalities.

The TV and movie industries were bitter enemies at first, as 1950s television became the most popular form of entertainment and caused thousands of movie houses to close.
film studios began producing pictures on a more ambitious scale than before, with bolder images and racier themes than television broadcast

NBC started a prime time wave in 1966 by buying films of recent vintage and launching Saturday Night at the Movies
Many of the films had to be edited to clean them up for television, but the essential "adult" themes remained—films like The Graduate and Love Story
Networks had to loosen their rules for content in the prime time movie slots.

By the late 1970s, cable's pay channels—HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, and The Movie Channel were able to outbid the networks for the top titles, and the trend ended
Today, the studios have a greater dependency on television as an advertising medium than the networks have on movies as program fare.

The transition of MPAA-like ratings systems from movies to TV has been a political battleground in recent years, and also the source of both amusement and consternation among foreign observers.

“U.S. television and movies are full of violence of the most abhorrent and bizarre kind; senseless dismemberments and explosions. But while accepting such violence as entertainment, repressed U.S. attitudes toward sexuality censor most forms of nudity and love-making, even as a recent research study finds that the United States is the world's No. I producer of pornography.”

Claude-Jean Bertrand -French media scholar

How to balance the free expression of individual artists, writers, filmmakers, and reporters against the complaint of society about "morality?“

Rating systems and 'V'-chips are flawed because they depend on someone else—governments or program producers themselves—to make judgments on what is “appropriate.”

Title V, entitled “Obscenity and Violence”, outlines regulations regarding obscene programming on cable television, the scrambling of cable channels for nonsubscribers, sexually explicit adult video service programming, the cable operators' refusal to carry programs, coercion and enticement of minors, and online family empowerment. Clarifies current laws regarding communication of obscene materials.

In the Bush years, the Republican-controlled FCC was heavy-handed in targeting what it deems broadcast speech too impure for you to hear. Its rulings go way beyond the traditional “Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV” made famous by George Carlin’s uproarious comic riff.

“The FCC vigorously enforces this law where we find violations. In 2004 alone, the FCC took action in 12 cases, involving hundreds of thousands of complaints, assessing penalties and voluntary payments totaling approximately $8,000,000.
The Commission has also toughened its enforcement penalties by proposing monetary penalties based on each indecent utterance in a broadcast, rather than proposing a single monetary penalty for the entire broadcast.”

The FCC, with the continual assistance from Congress, is placing less emphasis on license revocation, and is seeking to increase maximum fines into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per utterance anything deemed "indecent.”
And since the Supreme Court has already ruled that the FCC has the authority to place some restrictions on content, don't expect any successful attempts to cut off any of the FCC's regulatory appendages any time soon.

In its first ruling on broadcast indecency standards in more than 30 years, the Supreme Court upheld a U.S. government policy that subjects television network broadcasters to fines if they air a single expletive on the airwaves before 10 p.m.
Even a fleeting use of the "F-word" or the "S-word" on U.S. network television remains subject to fines under a Supreme Court split ruling on that parent groups hailed but critics said was out of touch with ordinary Americans.