Media Watchdog - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Media Watchdogs; Ofcom

Don't these kinds of dogs usually hurt more children than violence on TV does?

Here in the US, we are so schizoid and deeply opposed to government censorship that we insist on having unaccountable private parties to do it instead.

—Bill Cole

There are rules of taste and decency on TV. There are also legal requirements to be followed.

In order to enforce these, governments set up media watchdogs. People (more often than not Moral Guardians) complain about a programme, the body looks at it and rules whether their complaints are justified.

The current UK record for most complaints (over 39,000) about a TV programme is held by Celebrity Big Brother, due to the bullying and possible racial abuse of eventual winner Shilpa Shetty.

The US version is the Federal Communications Commission, while the latest name for the UK television one is Ofcom (in addition there is the ASA for adverts and the voluntary PCC for print media). Many stations (in the US, at least) also have their own self-regulating "Standards and Practices" department (commonly known as "the network censors"). In Japan, the relevant body is the Eiga Rinri Kanri Iinkai, or Motion Picture Code of Ethics Committee (colloquially abbreviated as "Eirin;" don't ask it for help).

Whilst these authorities will crack down hard on depictions of any kind of behaviour of which they disapprove, many observers note that an interesting Double Standard frequently comes into play; material that includes or depictions of sex or nudity will often be treated in a harsher fashion than material featuring violence. As a result, many have reported the often absurd situation wherein a Media Watchdog has cracked down heavily on any nude / sexual content a text may contain whilst often leaving scenes of quite graphic or over-the-top violence comparatively untouched.

Getting Crap Past The Radar is the art of outsmarting the Media Watchdogs. See also Executive Meddling.

American stand-up comedian and social commentator George Carlin famously dealt with the situation soon after its inception in the U.S. by making it part of one of his concerts.

How about this? The FCC, an appointed body, not elected, answerable only to the President, decided all on its own that radio and TV were the only two parts of American media not protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. I'd like to repeat that because it sounds vaguely important. The FCC, an appointed body, not elected, answerable only to the President, decided all on its own that radio and TV were the only two parts of American media not protected by the free speech Amendment of the Constitution. Why did they do that? Because they got a letter from a minister in Mississippi! A Reverend Donald Wildmon heard something on the radio he didn't like. Well hey, Reverend, didn't anybody ever tell you that there are two knobs on the radio? Two! Knobs! On the radio! However, I'm sure the Reverend isn't too comfortable with anything that has two knobs on it anyway. Anyway, Reverend, there are two knobs on the radio. One of them turns the radio off, and the other one, changes the station! Imagine that, Reverend! You can actually change the station! It's called freedom of choice, and it's one of the principles this country was founded upon. Look it up at the library, Reverend, if you have any left when you finish burning all the books!

Examples:

Painfully obvious in Navy NCIS which depicts borderline realistic, and often gruesome, autopsy scenes. But the corpse's genitals are always conveniently blotched out by what looks like glare from a high-powered lamp. To this editor it points out perfectly just how ridiculous this behaviour can get.
- Especially as, in one episode, DeNozzo tests a theory by asking the coroner, Ducky, to see a deceased man's member.
BBC Sketch Show The Mary Whitehouse Experience took its name from an infamous self-appointed British moral guardian.
- Mrs Whitehouse is also satirized as one of the three "Pigs" in Pink Floyd's song of that name.
- She was also satirized in an episode of The Goodies. It seems she wrote to the show to complement them as being one of the few "clean" shows on TV. They didn't like that.
Ever subversive, American cartoons are rife with jabs at their resident network's Media Watchdog. A few examples:
- During the first two seasons of Reboot (which is actually a Canadian show, but the concept is the same), several jokes were made at the expense of ABC's Broadcast Standards and Practices Department (BS&P). These include a weapon that fires life rafts being labeled "BSnP Approved", and a thinly-disguised parody of the Village People singing a song to the tune of "YMCA" about the BS&P.
  - And during the third season, once they had cut ties with ABC and moved to syndication (giving them much more control over their own show), one can see a tombstone in a game that reads "Here lies the Mainframe Joint Venture, an unholy alliance."
- When Beavis And Butthead did away with Beavis' pyromania-induced Catch Phrase of "Fire! Fire! Fire!" they replaced it with him shouting "Water! Water! Water!" whenever he saw a large body of it as a not-too-subtle jab at the censors. When Senator Fritz Hollings (D- S.C.) tried to cite the pair as a bad influence on kids, but misidentified them as "Beaver and Buffcoat", the animators used it as an in-joke, coming from the mouth of a prison inmate .
  - In an episode involving Burger World, Beavis can be heard screaming "Fryer! Fryer! Fryer!" after he dumps all the patties on the grill.
  - Similarly, while they were watching the video for Rollins Band's "Liar", Beavis began to chant: "Liar, liar! Liar, liar, pants on — whoa."
  - In another Video Segment, they watch a Video that has a Man On Fire. Beavis don't react at all to it, and, when Butthead tells him about it later, we find out that Beavis wasn't even paying attention to it.
- The Beetlejuice cartoon also spoofed ABC's Broadcast Standards and Practices in one episode, where a bossy fairy-godmother figure named Goody Two-Shoes, sent from the Bureau of Sweetness and Prissiness (BS&P), ordered the gang to clean up their act, and eventually used her magic to briefly turn the show into a syrupy Sit Com a la Leave It To Beaver.
- The Tiny Toons episode "Washingtoon" dealt with a media watchdog destroying Acme Acres to prevent the further existence of funny cartoons. Of course, this is a show that openly mentions network censors in the theme song, so...
- One episode of The Fairly Odd Parents featured a character being abducted by the FCC's MIB squad for using the word "moron" on the radio. (Apparently it's okay to use that word on TV, but not on the radio)
- The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes series features a regular character known as The Censor Lady who constantly butts in to demand the characters behave in a more kid-friendly fashion.
- In an episode of Animaniacs two network censors objected to every violent act the Warner siblings did and showed them a parody of The Smurfs as how they want them to act; later on Attila the Hun attacks them, and the censors try to win him over with kindness. It doesn't work.
  - Another episode had a B-plot where Slappy Squirrel had to build a machine to remove on-screen violence - it worked by blocking the audience's view and having the violence happen offscreen. (Incidentally, the A-plot was Skippy Squirrel trying to stop bullying through nonviolent means and utterly failing at it.)
  - One mainstay of the show was the Wheel of Morality, spoofing the Aesop. When Wakko and Dot complain about it and ask whose stupid idea it was to include morals, Yakko informs them that it was the Fox Kids execs.
- In Histeria there was recurring character much like The Censor Lady named Lydia Karaoke who showed up ever time some one said or did something unacceptable.
The anime series Oruchuban Ebichu was designed to push the boundaries of the Japanese broadcast code, trying to get away with as much as possible without being censored. However, certain parts did end up getting censored, though a lot of edgy material made it in.
In Fushigi Yuugi, Miaka is told to remove her clothes as part of a test to see if she is worthy to receive an object of power; she starts stripping, but stops while still wearing a one-piece undergarment and says "This is the limit of what the broadcast code allows."
Notoriously, the final episode of Excel Saga was designed specifically to violate the standards of Tokyo Air Check (the Japanese version of the BS&P). Everything down to the length of the episode (one minute longer than normal) was designed to make it impossible to air. The episode was titled, appropriately, "Going Too Far". (And indeed, it didn't air.)
The original Looney Tunes shorts would often make fun of the Hays code, the restrictive regime of self-regulation that defined what could and couldn't be done in films until the early 1960s. Furthermore, the writers and animators would often put material into the cartoons specifically to be cut, the idea being that the censors would cut the obviously over-the-top stuff and leave the borderline material that the animators really wanted in. Sometimes, though, the sacrificial material was unexpectedly left alone. In one example, a dog suffering from flea-bites starts dragging his rump around Porky Pig's house. The animators threw in a line where the dog breaks the fourth wall to tell the audience, "I'd better stop this, I might get to like it!" That line was meant to be sacrificed but the whole sequence was left in.
- A direct jab at the code was made in a Tweety Bird Wartime Cartoon involving two cats, Babbit and Catsello (transparent pastiches of the comedy team Abbott and Costello). Catsello goes up a ladder to get Tweety, and his partner tells him "Give me the bird!" The exasperated Catsello makes an aside, saying "If the Hays Office would only let me, I'd give him the bird alright!"
- The Animaniacs would later respond to this same question with "We'd love to, really, but the Fox censors won't allow it."
Similar to the Looney Tunes example above, Chuck Barris, producer and host of The Gong Show, tired of network censors nixing acts which he thought were fairly innocuous, so he began throwing deliberately outrageous ones at them so as to distract the Watchdogs from the acts he really wanted to broadcast. Naturally enough, in accordance with Finagles Law several of these intentionally over-the-top acts were allowed on the air, including the infamous Popsicle Twins, a pair of women made up as teenaged girls who sat on stage and provocatively sucked popsicles while the song "I'm In The Mood For Love" played.
The South Park episode "It Hits the Fan" was meant to push the limits of censorship, since the characters utter the word "shit" 162 times, even using a counter at the bottom of the screen to indicate exactly how many times it was said. The plot of the episode itself spoofed the hooplah over the use of the phrase "Shit happens" on NYPD Blue: overuse of the word "shit" following its appearance on the Show Within A Show Cop Drama ends up spreading a horrible plague and letting loose a dragon, which is battled by the ancient Knights of Standards and Practices.
Similar to the above example, but thrown against the MPAA, South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut was originally designed to test just how far they could take an R rated movie before it became NC-17. The answer was made clear in the film: "Remember what the MPAA says; Horrific, deplorable violence is okay, as long as people don't say any naughty words! That's what this war is all about!"
- The MPAA also made them change the original title, "South Park: All Hell Breaks Loose" because of the word 'hell'. The implications of "Bigger, Longer, and Uncut" were hilariously lost on them.
- Also, Parker and Stone followed the examples set by Looney Tunes and The Gong Show — every time the MPAA would mark a scene as unacceptable, they would replace it with something even worse. If their accounts of making the movie are to be believed, the MPAA would nearly always approve the more offensive revision. Apparently they don't care what you replace the scenes they don't like with, just that they're replaced. Maybe they were afraid that if they complained about the "improved" version, the result would be even worse than that.
In the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode "Gee Whiz" Meatwad and Frylock watch a mock PSA about network censorship that ends with the line "By following standards and practices you're guaranteed to make a mediocre product that no one can relate to." In fact, gags aimed at censorship liberally sprinkle the episode, ending with a No Fourth Wall moment at the end where Frylock and Master Shake angrily ask the camera if the censors liked it. The answer: "ACCEPTABLE!" This take on the episode emerged after a previous version was rejected for being too offensive. The plot circles around Meatwad believing that a mysterious image on a billboard, which he thinks looks like Jesus, has gotten him pregnant; in the episode as aired, the characters circle the Jesus Taboo by using the term "Gee Whiz", thus the episode title.
- Later, ATHF would have an episode called the "Dickisode". Prior to censoring the word "dick" was said 53 times, and there were 4,437 visible "dicks" (4.93 a second). All of the offending objects were covered with NTSC test bars.
Fear of the Media Watchdogs was one of the contributing factors as to why Beakmans World saved answering the most popular question sent into the show, "Why do we fart?", for the very last segment, after the show was canned for good. After all, they couldn't cancel the show twice...or could they?
The video game Atelier Iris ~Eternal Mana~ has a little fun with this: In one dialogue exchange, Verbally Ticked Cat Girl Norn is afraid of monsters, so she asks the hero, Klein, to sleep with her. She thinks what she's saying is totally innocuous, but a flustered Klein responds by saying: "I can't! The ESRB would go nuts!"
- This line is actually missing in the PAL version (though the game retains its fourth-wall wonders), and Klein simply answers with a flustered "...you're joking..."
  - "The PEGI and both OFL Cs would go nuts!" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
This is spoofed in Drawn Together when Wooldoor, Xandir, Spanky Ham, and Captain Hero celebrate Wooldoor's questionable show being aired despite censorship. They toast to the show being aired and to freedom of speech, each chiming in random vulgarity. The conversation ends with Captain Hero giving a long and detailed description of him mutilating, disemboweling, and molesting a pig while the others watch in awe and horror.
The Family Guy episode "PTV" revolves around and spoofs this concept.
- In the episode, the FCC went so far as to try to censor real life. "His chin kinda looks like balls. Should I censor that, too?"
  - And they strapped an automatic censor to Peter that turns farts into Stephen Wright jokes. Watch as Peter strains, only to hear: "I spilled spot remover on my dog, now he's gone."
Parodied in one of the earlier Halloween episodes of The Simpsons, where the cartoon figure of a network censor is stabbed to death while crossing out parts of the script, with the episode rating going up with each stabbing, eventually reaching "TV-666". Whilst his demise is bloody, the sentiments he utters during his murder ("Oh what the fudge! Oh Jiminy Christmas! Darn it!") are far from offensive.
- Taken to greater Strawman levels than usual in the episode "You Kent Always Say What You Want".
Parodied in an old Smothers Brothers sketch where the Smothers Brothers hand their new script to a team of censors. Each one reads a page and laughs even harder than the last one, before throwing the page away and saying "no." Only the last page remained because it wasn't funny at all.
Webcomic example: In this Loserz strip.
Head of the British Board of Film Censors at the time, John Trevelyan, didn't like the early James Bond movies, making cuts to them. EON named a Bond villain after him.
In Wes Craven's New Nightmare there is a psychiatrist who blames violent movies to be the cause of the (pre-teen) protagonists mental condition. Her name is Doctor Heffner, a hint at the MPAA´s former chairman Richard Heffner, who gave Wes Craven a hard time repeatedly.
- An extra Take That was in just how out-of-touch the psychiatrist was. She tells the actress who was in the Nightmare On Elm Street movies that her son apparently knows who Freddy Kruger is, and from this assumes the mother has been showing her child her old movies (all of this in a disapproving tone). The actress snaps back, in exasperation, "Every kid knows who Freddy Kruger is! He's like Santa Claus!"
In an episode of MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch, the show's hosts, Johnny Gomez and Nick Diamond, were arrested by the Broadcasters Opposing Offensive Behavior (B.O.O.B.) for showing offensive content on the show, namely airing an illegal "cockfight" fight between Tommy Lee and Ron Jeremy (both of which were in their chicken suits).
This troper remembers a friend telling him that No More Heroes parodied the censorship issue by joking that putting anything more extreme into the game would get the game an AO rating. (An Adults-Only rating is suicide for a game, because a certain large retailer refuses to stock games with the AO rating.)
- This actually happened, in the dialogue before the final battle, no less. There's also the implication that the game would have to be re-edited if the plot point referenced was actually uttered, thereby delaying the game. To top it off, this is all followed by the line, "You don't want this game to become No More Heroes Forever, do you?" This line is in the original Japanese version as well, since CERO (Japan's equivalent of the ESRB) is similar in how they act.
- They also went for broke in the dialogue that they skip through. It's a REALLY, REALLY bad story!
- said dialog describes that Travis and Jeane are half siblings, and are implied to have done it
- You can slow down the speed so you can hear what is really being said.
Many fans of Veronica Mars joke that the storm of double-entendres present in the dialogue simply overloaded the censors' filthometers and they gave up.
A moment that should have been dramatic was turned almost Narmy in a recent episode of Battlestar Galactica when Starbuck started dropping fraks like nobody's business. We know exactly what she's saying. Why do we have to have drama ruined by good but ultimately fruitless tries at alternate swearing?
- Brilliantly parodied in this Robot Chicken sketch, with most of the actual Battlestar Galactica cast.
  - "Frak" is the last remnant of the Original BS Gs habit of having alternate names for almost everything: seconds became centons, years became yahrns, fuck became frak. While the alternate time system was dropped, frak was specifically included as an homage to the original. Originally, there was some bowdlerization involved, but that's not the only reason its there.
In early episodes of Lost, ABC's Standards and Practices insisted that Charlie's heroin use could not be shown. Instead, it had to be implied with cutaway shots.
In a Dilbert comic, the syndicate made Adams remove a police officer's gun, which he replaced with a doughnut. This would be pretty standard, except for the fact that the punchline was the officer shooting an unarmed suspect, which he still does...with the doughnut. Someone get Dunkin' to start selling those.
In one episode of The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby-Doo a watchdog stops the show, insisting that the flame attacks from a dragon are too violent. Scrappy turns it around, however, insisting she has something personal against dragons.
Ironicaly, While France has some "classical" media watchdogs, some of them actually complain because they believe that French TV and movies are not bold enough.
Let's not forget The Goon Show, which opted to take the piss by putting in completely out of context punchlines to dirty jokes, then pointing out that anyone who got the joke had no right to be offended. And let's not even get started on the brandy.