LOS ANGELES — These are difficult days for the decency police.
The Parents Television Council spent most of the last decade as a conservative superstar in the culture wars. By pressuring the Federal Communications Commission to crack down on racy programming, the council was responsible for record-setting fines against media giants like CBS and the News Corporation.
But the organization now finds itself damaged, defanged by court challenges to the F.C.C.’s hard-line position, by its own dwindling finances and by internal troubles that resulted in its accusing a former senior employee of extortion. Meanwhile, the entertainment industry — once so afraid of the council’s wrath that Fox blurred the naked behind of an animated character — is pushing the boundaries of taste with renewed intensity.
Forget cartoon nudity. One of CBS’s new fall sitcoms is called “$#*! My Dad Says.” A catchy song with a highly vulgar title and chorus by the Warner Music Group singer Cee Lo Green has burned up the Web. Miley Cyrus, the 17-year-old Disney star, writhes on a bed in black underwear in her new music video.
The council has tried to focus public indignation on such programming, but the efforts have mostly failed to gain serious traction.
A statement it issued on Oct. 8 regarding Ms. Cyrus’s video, calling it “unfortunate that she would participate in such a sexualized video like this one,” was mild by council standards (and did not note that her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, is on the council’s advisory board).
The council is more exercised by “$#*! My Dad Says,” declaring on Sept. 17 that it would “not rest” until the network changed the title or the show was canceled. It may be a while. Pressure on advertisers has long been one of the sharpest arrows in the council’s quiver, but the sitcom, starring William Shatner, has so far carried a full roster of ads for each episode, according to CBS. One advertiser is Burger King.
New fodder is not in short supply. On Wednesday, the council was infuriated by GQ magazine, which published sexualized photos of “Glee” cast members in its November issue. The actresses, unlike Ms. Cyrus, are adults, but noting that “Glee” is a show about high school, the council issued a statement saying the display “borders on pedophilia.” To what end, though?
“Advertisers still fear the Parents Television Council, but not as much as they used to,” said John Rash, who teaches mass media and politics at the University of Minnesota and is a former executive at Campbell Mithun, a media-buying agency in Minneapolis. “It’s hard for the council to stir up indignation about cultural issues at a time of economic woe.”
Timothy F. Winter, the council’s president, said his organization, albeit weakened because of the recession, was as relevant as ever. This month, for instance, the council announced that it had persuaded pharmaceutical companies to participate in an initiative to alert parents about which broadcast television shows would contain ads for Viagra and other erectile dysfunction drugs. The council also see progress in forcing the greater regulation of violent video games.
“The downturn had a huge impact, but I feel we’ve turned a corner,” Mr. Winter said. “We’re not out of the woods, but we are told all the time that we are the beacon of light out there. Families rely greatly on our work.”
Mr. Winter said that he was confident that the campaign against CBS would bear fruit. “At the end of the day, we’re hopeful that advertisers will realize they shouldn’t be associated with excrement,” he said.
The troubles of the Parents Television Council, founded in 1995 by the conservative activist L. Brent Bozell III, appear to have started about two years ago. As the organization successfully busied itself with cleaning up America’s airwaves, its internal operations grew messy, an examination of internal documents and Internal Revenue Service forms shows.
Escalating costs collided with declining donations, resulting in a 2008 loss of almost $1 million. In 2009, as the recession battered fund-raising efforts anew, council revenue totaled $2.9 million, a 26 percent drop from the previous year. To cut costs, the organization has reduced its staff by 38 percent over the last two years.
The council’s elaborate reports — given provocative titles like “MTV Smut Peddlers” — have grown infrequent, severely hampering the organization’s lobbying and fund-raising efforts. In 2008, the council published four major reports; it published one in 2009 and has published none so far this year. (Mr. Winter said he planned to publish three reports in the next two months, including one centered on online video.)
During this period, the council encountered difficulties with its direct-mail fund-raising system. Like many nonprofit groups, the council raises money by mail: sign and return this petition — preferably with a donation — and we will send it to the F.C.C. But internal documents show that, at least for a period of some months, the council was opening tens of thousands of envelopes, looking for money, and skipping the rest of the steps.
In a March 2009 e-mail to Mr. Winter, Patrick W. Salazar, who was the council’s vice president for development but is now one of its critics and has been accused by the group of trying to extort money from it, wrote, “Almost 195,000 pieces of donor/member mail was never sent to the intended recipient.” He added, “Most of these were time-sensitive docs whose value is now shot.” That September, Mr. Salazar sent another concerned note to Mr. Winter about the fulfillment of direct-mail petitions.
“Dude, I told you I was working on fulfillment,” Mr. Winter responded. “It is under control.”
Mr. Winter said that he had done his best to sort through the backlog, but he conceded that ultimately, the council decided that a stack of petitions was too old to be of any value. The council says it is now caught up.
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Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, a charity watchdog that gives the council a “C-plus” rating for financial efficiency based on its I.R.S. filings, said unfulfilled direct mail should ring “serious alarms” with potential donors. “It certainly tarnishes the credibility of this organization,” Mr. Borochoff said.
Mr. Salazar was also troubled by membership claims. For instance, council leaders put membership at “more than 1.3 million.” But that number counts people who have signed a petition or donated since the group’s founding, according to the council. In reality, 12,000 people at most respond to annual fund-raising appeals, Mr. Salazar said.
Mr. Winter says there is nothing misleading about the council’s membership claims, asserting that many nonprofit groups count participation in a similar fashion. As for the meager response to fund-raising appeals, Mr. Winter said that is partly a reflection of the number of solicitations sent out. “We can’t afford to communicate with everybody on our total membership list every time,” he said.
In November, Mr. Salazar left the council. He says he quit. The group says he was fired but will not cite a reason. Mr. Salazar then started an effort to extract thousands of dollars in severance by threatening to alert the news media, including The New York Times, about the internal dysfunction he said he witnessed. In addition to the direct-mail predicament and the membership count, Mr. Salazar claimed a laundry list of other wrongdoings.
In a statement, the council said that Mr. Salazar had “demanded that the P.T.C. pay him a substantial sum of cash or he would contact P.T.C. members and the media with certain allegations.” It continued: “His allegations are littered with patently false statements and misrepresentations of the truth. The P.T.C. has refused to negotiate a financial payment (or any other terms).”
The council asked the Los Angeles Police Department to investigate Mr. Salazar for extortion. A police spokesman said an investigation was completed and presented to the city attorney, who rejected it on the grounds that Mr. Salazar’s actions did not constitute a crime.
Mr. Salazar, who is now a fund-raiser for Pierce College in Woodland Hills, Calif., said in an interview that he wanted the council to pay him to go away but denied that his requests amounted to extortion.
As the council was dealing with Mr. Salazar, it ran into another buzz saw. In July, a federal appeals court struck down one of the council’s most promoted achievements, an F.C.C. policy barring the use of “fleeting expletives” on television.
The decision stemmed from a challenge by Fox, CBS and other broadcasters to the F.C.C.’s decision in 2004 to begin enforcing a stricter standard of what kind of language is allowed on free, over-the-air television.
The court unanimously ruled that the policy created a chilling effect because it left broadcasters without a guide to what the commission would find offensive. The F.C.C. has since appealed the ruling, arguing that the court overstepped its bounds. That petition is still pending.
Mr. Winter called the decision “a slap in the face” for families. “We were frankly expecting it,” he said, adding that he was confident the appeal would succeed.
The stated mission of the Parents Television Council is “to restore responsibility and decency to the entertainment industry.” Although officially nonpartisan, it shares office space with another nonprofit group founded by Mr. Bozell, the Media Research Center, which combats what it sees as liberal bias in the news media. Mr. Bozell is paid by both organizations, an arrangement that has been criticized by some watchdogs, including Mr. Borochoff of the American Institute of Philanthropy.
To further its mission, the council uses a combination of technology and human analysts to monitor prime-time programming, particularly on broadcast networks subject to F.C.C. scrutiny. The data is used for a family viewing guide on the council’s Web site; shows are labeled red, yellow or green based on language, violence, depictions of sex and “adult themes.”
Taking the decency battle to advertisers has become a bigger part of the council’s focus since Mr. Winter took over as president in 2007. Each year, the council ranks the 10 best and 10 worst advertisers based on how frequently they sponsor “family-friendly TV programs” or “objectionable content including foul language, violence and sexual themes and images.”
In 2009, General Mills ranked as the best, and the fast-food operator Yum Brands, which owns Taco Bell and KFC, as the worst.
At the moment, the council is focused on advertisers who support “$#*! My Dad Says.” After first singling out national sponsors, the council has shifted its attack to the local level, asking its members to record the show and take note of commercials for local businesses. Members are then supposed to e-mail the lists to the council.
“Your help will assure that CBS gets the message,” read the sign-off to the council’s call to action. “We don’t want any of your $#*! in front of our families!”
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