Arts & Ammo

Preserving Creative Freedom

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals has thrown out the fine levied by the FCC against CBS for Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show.

Andrew Jay Schwartzman of the Media Access Project, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of a group of TV writers, directors and producers, said the ruling “is an important advance for preserving creative freedom on the air.”

Creative freedom to do what? Have a malfunction? It’s hard to buy that excuse:

The 90 million people watching the Super Bowl, many of them children, heard Justin Timberlake sing, “Gonna have you naked by the end of this song,” as he reached for Jackson’s bustier.

And apparently Janet Jackson had planned the stunt:

The FCC had argued that Jackson’s nudity, albeit fleeting, was graphic and explicit and CBS should have been forewarned. Jackson has said the decision to add a costume reveal—exposing her right breast, which had only a silver sunburst “shield” covering her nipple—came after the final rehearsal.

Silver sunburst shields – worn by performers everywhere in case their other garments accidentally fall off. No, the wardrobe functioned as planned.

The creative content of a Jackson’s breast – what artistic insight, what bold juxtaposition of forms, what an amazing dime-store trinket covering the areola!

But our illustrious court of appeals missed the significance of this creative breakthrough and held Jackson’s breast (so to speak) artistically mundane – so mundane that CBS didn’t have sufficient warning that flashing it on national TV during the most watched “family” event of the year might be considered indecent. The FCC, according to the court, deviated from its 30-year practice of only fining for events so “pervasive as to amount to ’shock treatment’ for the audience.”

The event was intended to shock, to stick a thumb (or whatever) in the collective eye of the unfortunate masses in flyover country, clinging to their religion and false modesty.

But our sophisticated judges were not shocked, and they don’t think the rest of us were either, even though the event was reported that way at the time and still commands significant attention more than four years later.

Rest assured that it will be harder to shock us in the future (although those who hail this decision as “preserving creative freedom on the air” will try their best) and that the courts will continue to ratchet standards of decency ever downward.

July 21st, 2008 Posted by Fitzroy | Law | one comment

Failing Civics

Take the American Civics Literacy Test and compare your score with both freshmen and graduating seniors at America’s colleges.

The Anchoress inspired me to take the test today. I matched her score of 56 out of 60, or 93%. Oh well, you can’t know everything.

But then I didn’t go to Harvard where the graduating seniors had a mean score of 69.56%, which was the highest of all the schools.

The test is administered by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute to 14,000 freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges and universities. It tests American history, political thought, market economy, and international relations.

The average senior failed all four subjects, scoring less than 60% in each. Among the findings:

• Seniors do not know basic facts of American history. Only 45.9% know that Yorktown was the battle that ended the American Revolution.
  
  
• Seniors do not know the basic timeline of American history. Only 47.7% know that Fort Sumter came before Gettysburg and that Gettysburg came before Appomattox.
  
  
• Seniors do not know America’s founding documents. Only 45.9% know that the line “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” comes from the Declaration of Independence.
  
  
• Seniors do not know the rudiments of America’s historical relations with the world. Only 42.7% know that NATO was formed to resist Soviet expansion.

The results tend to be worse in the most prestigious universities.

Colleges that do well in popular rankings typically do not do well in advancing civic knowledge.

• Generally, the higher U.S. News & World Report ranks a college, the lower it ranks here in civic learning. At four colleges U.S. News ranked in its top 12 (Cornell, Yale, Duke, and Princeton), seniors scored lower than freshmen. These colleges are elite centers of “negative learning.” Cornell was the third-worst performer last year and the worst this year.
  
  
• Surveyed colleges ranked by Barron’s imparted only about one-third the civic learning of colleges overlooked by Barron’s.

How do you “unteach” history and civics to college students? I don’t think it’s very hard. One method would be simply to ignore those subjects entirely and rely on the students to forget what they have learned. Another would be to fill the students’ heads with enough mumbo-jumbo that they can no longer discern the facts. Another would be to design a curriculum around how students “feel” about civics and history. Another would be to teach history only as it relates to gender and sexual preferences. . . .

We could go on.

July 21st, 2008 Posted by Fitzroy | Education | no comments