The Parents Television Council

Consider a hypothetical situation where you are a parent with young children and are concerned with the content your kids are exposed to when they watch television.

Do you:

a) Get rid of your television altogether
b) Restrict the programs and viewing times your children watch TV
c) Allow limited and/or supervised viewing of content and take the time to talk to your children about themes or images you may consider to be for “adults”
d) Decide that the whole world should pretend that words and actions you find inappropriate don’t exist. Form an organization dedicated to aggressively petitioning for censorship and sanitization of television content “because our children our watching”. Focus only on broadcast TV, because antiquated laws allow the FCC to directly censor this medium, while essentially ignoring much less tame things like cable and the internet. Bitch self-righteously about accidental non-events like Janet Jackson’s sub-second breast exposure, to the extent that 99.8% of subsequent complaints to the FCC come from your group. Hire “a full-time team of entertainment analysts, a cadre of interns, [and] support staff” to record and watch every hour of prime time broadcast TV, so that each and every naughty word and deed can be thoroughly documented in your massive database of “smut”. Assume that when your kids turn 18, they’ll magically become adults equipped with all the knowledge you managed to save them from, despite years of lying to them about the world.

If you chose d), you’re almost certainly Parents Television Council founder L. Brent Bozell III, and a terrible person. Good luck with your quest to infantilize the world for the sake of your children (a.k.a. bullying the government into perpetuating your own conservative Christian worldview), L. Brent. May your children never learn what a fuck their father is (or hear the word fuck at all!).