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BRENT BOZELL, AND HIS PARENTS TELEVISION COUNCIL, CONTINUE TO ASSAIL THE TV INDUSTRY FOR FILLING ITS SCHEDULES WITH WHAT HE CALLS SEWAGE BY TODD SHIELDS
IN A LITTLE ROOM ON A LOWER FLOOR of the U.S. Senate's Russell Office Building, Brent Bozell fires another volley at what he calls die "slime" diat seeps nightly through millions of televisions to pollute America's living rooms and its children. His target today is Viacom's MTV
He's not got much of an audience. No lawmakers are here to show support. Maybe a dozen journalists have come out on a winter morning. Bozell, founder of the Parents Television Council that aims to clean up prime-time TV, gamely plays on. He looses an avalanche of facts-in 171 hours of programming on MTV, his analysts found 1,548 sexual scenes containing 3,056 depictions of sex or various forms of nudity and 2,881 verbal sexual references.
That's just for starters. Because BozelPs signature technique includes fact-based analysis, he has, of course, more to deliver (1,068 violent incidents and 3,483 uses of foul language). But soon another Bozell emerges, one given less to statistics and more to verbal pugilism. In just half an hour of question-and-answer with a tame press gaggle, Bozell says: federal regulators are "rather shameless;" the TV industry is "passing the buck;" those who advertise on raunchy programming are "directly responsible for poisoning the minds of young children;" and cable TV has "just been out of control."
The feds, TV producers, advertisers, the cable industry. He's fighting on a lot of fronts, and he's fighting some big companies. That doesn't faze him at all.
"We're going to win this one," Bozell says. "All of their millions of dollars [are] not going to stop parents from having the right to decide what it is they want in their homes."
L. Brent Bozell III has been fighting a long time. He spent most of the 1980s working for the National Conservative Political Action Committee, emerging as the head of that fund-raising group for political candidates. Bozell left the group in August 1987 and two months later founded the Media Research Center, which seeks to unveil liberal bias in the media through computer-assisted logging of what its analysts view on tape-recorded TV shows-the content-analysis...