The heat is on

A heatwave swept the nation in July 1977. New York City had the hottest July 19 on record at 102 degrees. Record highs were also recorded in Washington, D.C.; Baltimore, Maryland; Akron, Ohio; and Roanoke, Virginia. Stores in Denver, Colorado, ran out of fans, and in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the home plate umpire at the Phillies game passed out from heat exhaustion.

But the sweltering heat didn’t keep a group of seven ladies from rallying outside their local TV station in Houston, Texas. In fact, they came to bring some heat of their own.

The women were part of the Greater Houston chapter of the National Federation for Decency (NFD), and they came with frustration about ABC and its raunchy new sitcom, Soap. (See The Stand, 9/25.) The Channel 13 station manager let the ladies into the air-conditioned KRTK-TV offices and gave them a chance to voice their concerns.

“We don’t want Soap shown at all – anywhere,” insisted Pamela Taylor, the chapter president. “Our group is asking churches and the PTA to help us boycott the ABC network and its sponsors,” she told The Houston Post.

When Don Wildmon first announced “Turn the Television Off Week,” he heard from dozens of other Americans who shared his concern about TV. Pamela Taylor and Theresa Wheeler of Pasadena, Texas, were among them. They had already formed their own nonprofit group, Concerned Citizens, to help promote the campaign in the Houston area. But after hearing Don’s call for the formation of local NFD chapters, they officially changed their name and joined the NFD, according to The Houston Chronicle.

“It is our plan to organize a chapter of NFD in every village and city in America,” Don boldly told The Commercial Appeal in March. “We urge the social action committee of every religious body in America to join us as affiliate chapters.”

By July, there were 45 NFD chapters nationwide – and Greater Houston was an exceptional prototype.

The public outrage against Soap had continued to bubble over throughout the summer. Hopeful that station managers might pull the show if they felt enough local pressure, the NFD did the gritty work of organizing pickets at 11 ABC affiliate stations.

But Don was busy on something even more crucial. If he could put his plan in motion, it would empower citizens to fight television immorality like nothing before.

The system

The NFD’s TV monitoring project would be the first to document the amount of profanity and sexual content on prime-time television. Clear, uniform data points were crucial if Don was going to convince advertisers or networks of the moral degradation of TV. He needed his monitors to know what to look for, how to mark it, and how to discover who was paying for it.

The concept of television monitoring was not original to Don Wildmon. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania had been monitoring TV violence since the 1960s.

In 1976, a group called the National Citizens Committee for Better Broadcasting (NCCBB) received funding from the American Medical Association to track violence on TV as well. Don took the NCCBB’s work on violence and added to it his own, as later explained in his book titled The Man the Networks Love to Hate.

Despite the project’s importance, it demanded a volunteer base with sustained commitment and attention to detail. Getting 15 people to show up for a few hours with picket signs in the July heat had been hard enough. Getting what was needed for this project was a request of another order.

The vision

Don’s vision was large.

“The NFD is asking for volunteers from different cultural, educational, social, and religious backgrounds and from different geographical locations in the U.S. to work with us in this project,” Don said in the May 1977 NFD Newsletter. “Those who volunteer will be asked to watch television for one night each week for one month and to report on what they watch using forms prepared by the NFD.”

The monitoring cycle would run for 15 weeks, from early September through mid-December.

By this point, the NFD mailing list had about 1,400 addresses on it. The call for TV monitors brought back only 21 willing participants. It was just enough to spread out the work to one person (1), per network (3), per night (7), although they needed to commit to the entire 15 weeks rather than the one month initially promised.

Not surprisingly, the volunteers were grouped in areas where enough momentum had already spawned a local chapter: Houston, Texas; San Diego, California; Memphis, Tennessee; southeast Wisconsin; and Don’s new home base in Tupelo, Mississippi.

He spent time carefully developing the forms so that the information could be properly tabulated and easily compiled. Furthermore, because of the importance of accurate data, Don committed to personally travel out of state to train all the volunteers before September.

Documenting instances of profanity was straightforward enough – simply mark the offensive word or phrase and the number of uses on each program. Documenting sexuality on television, however, required far more finesse and awareness.

TV writers constantly battled their own network censors, and they resented any moral limits placed on their creations. Because of this, Don needed his monitors to be prepared for:

• Direct references to sex

• Off-handed comments, hints, implications, and double entendres

• New lingo or suggestive turns of phrase

• Sexual activity occurring inside or outside the context of marriage

• “Jiggly scenes” – those moments when the camera lingers on an actor’s physique

Added to this, monitors were responsible for listing all the program sponsors and the length of every advertisement.

The call to action

As September rolled around, the monitors started their work, and Don taught himself how to use a computer so he could input the data. Although the full monitoring project took months, an immediate call to action was made after the first week.

The day after the premiere of Soap, the NFD launched a boycott against the program’s biggest sponsors: Max Factor Cosmetics, Wesson Oil, and Bic Products (known mostly for pens, lighters, and
shavers), according to the North County Times in Oceanside, California.

Max Factor and Wesson responded almost instantly, pulling advertising from Soap within a month. Meanwhile, the NFD ratcheted up pressure on Bic.

“September monitoring indicates that Bic is the most sex-oriented sponsor on prime-time television for the small number of ads they run,” Don told the press.

The first monitoring project was completed by the middle of December, with the full report published in early 1978.

Don may not have realized how much heat this effort would bring. It all may have seemed to him like common sense accountability – something any motivated individual could do to educate himself about the current use of public airwaves.

The monitoring report became a powerful resource in the fight, but it was also forcefully opposed. There was too much money at stake. For those who had the eyes to see it, the force and subtlety of network deflection was apparent.

After all, cold, hard facts can suddenly become incredibly malleable in the hands of Hollywood professionals who make up stories for a living.