It’s fascinating to me to watch the resurgence of piety that has taken over our country in the last 4 years. First, Janet Jackson’s boob and now the stupid Desperate Housewives promo on Monday Night Football… people are mortified, mortified at the things that are on TV these days. It is, of course, asinine for people to act as if this is some major new problem. At best, the MNF promo was silly.

Of course, the concerns aren’t always directed at the right place. Brad DeLong identifies an outrageous text his 14-year-old had to read in ninth grade. He summarizes the story arc:

In this context I find it somewhat alarming that the Fourteen-Year-Old is exposed–in his ninth-grade school curriculum, yet!–to a book that I can only call a near-Lolita scenario.* She is 13 or 14. He is 20 or 21. He sees her across the room and starts stalking her, instantly forgetting his previous infatuation that he had claimed was his “true love.” She is flattered and intrigued, trying to cope with hormones and feelings she has never felt before–and soon she is enthralled by his honeyed words and eager to surrender her mind and judgment to his will. The imbalance in power and confidence between the barely-teenaged ingenue and her mature lover–a thug and a killer–is alarming. The only concession to decorum and order is that they are secretly married by a corrupted priest before the panties actually hit the floor.

Read the rest of his post if you want to know the title of this outrageous text. (Hint: you probably read it too)

One real item to take away from these incidents: letters and complaints to the FCC (or any organization) are overvalued in the age of blogs, email, and the Internet. I suspect that corporations probably have some internal method they use to weigh complaints. In other words, each handwritten letter received, for example, might be considered as 500 people who were similarly concerned but didn’t bother to write in. A caller might be considered the equivalent of 50 people who couldn’t be bothered to call in. I’m making up the numbers, but you see what I’m getting at (and I suspect the equivalences to be much higher, e.g. 1 letter == 2000 viewers).

Those metrics, like other sampling and polling, are reasonable given the more or less randomness of letter writing pre-Internet. The problem is that blogs, email, and other technologies that allow people to organize across the country in a more coherent manner distort the randomness of the “complaining people” sample. One blog, for example, was credited with pissing off the ombudsman for NPR, who complained:

The issue is whether people listen to NPR and are moved to complain or
whether they don’t listen and are moved to complain. As NPR’s ombudsman, I
tend to pay more attention to the former than the latter.

This is, of course, an absolutely fair and reasonable position to take. Corporations and others should take similar positions when evaluating complaints coming in to their offices. What may seem overwhelming, say 20,000 phone calls and emails over 8 hours (that’s 10,000/480 minutes = 20+ complaints a minute) may simply be the same as what in 1981 would’ve been 1000 total complaints over the same 8 hours. I don’t really have solid numbers to back this up, but with the relative power and popularity of blogs over their large and relatively homogenous audiences, this is a good hypothesis. We’ve also seen a growth in the popularity of shows like the 700 club, Focus on the Family’s radio broadcast, and Limbaugh in the past 20 years that gives that extra new media boost to complainer turnout.

If you still are skeptical, this excerpt from Frank Rich’s piece in the Times might be interesting:

Rush Limbaugh, taking a break from the legal deliberations of his drug rap and third divorce, set the hysterical tone. “I was stunned!” he told his listeners. “I literally could not believe what I had seen. … At various places on the Net you can see the video of this, and she’s buck naked, folks. I mean when they dropped the towel she’s naked. You see enough of her back and rear end to know that she was naked. There’s no frontal nudity in the thing, but I mean you don’t need that. …I mean, there are some guys with their kids that sit down to watch ‘Monday Night Football.’ “

Yes, there are - some, anyway - but you wonder how many of them were as upset as Mr. Limbaugh, whose imagination led him to mistake a lower back for a rear end. (He also said that the Sheridan-Owens encounter reminded him of the Kobe Bryant case; let’s not even go there.) The evidence suggests that Mr. Limbaugh’s prurient mind is the exception, not the rule. Though seen nationwide, and as early as 6 p.m. on the West Coast, the spot initially caused so little stir that the next morning only two newspapers in the country, both in Philadelphia, reported on it. ABC’s switchboards were not swamped by shocked viewers on Monday night. A spokesman for ABC Sports told The Philadelphia Inquirer that he hadn’t received a single phone call or e-mail in the immediate aftermath of the broadcast.

Even the stunned Mr. Limbaugh, curiously enough, didn’t get around to mounting his own diatribe until Wednesday. Mr. Owens’s agent, David Joseph, says that the flood of complaints at his office and Mr. Owens’s Web site also didn’t start until more than 24 hours after the incident - late Tuesday and early Wednesday. Were any of these complainants actual victims (or even viewers) of “Monday Night Football” or were they just a mob assembled after the fact by “family” groups, emboldened by their triumph in smiting “Saving Private Ryan” from 66 ABC stations the week before? Though the F.C.C. said on Wednesday that it had received 50,000 complaints about the N.F.L. affair, it couldn’t determine how many of them were duplicates - the kind generated by e-mail campaigns run by political organizations posting form letters ready to be clicked into cyberspace ad infinitum by anyone who has an index finger and two seconds of idle time.

Yeah, uh, let me tell you that there are a lot of duplicates, FCC. Oh, and by the way, the F.C.C. (I’m sure) has no political interest in fanning this story. None. Because, we all know, the FCC is apolit… yeah, OK, I can’t even say that with a straight face.

Update: The Daily Howler takes issue with Rich’s assertion that ABC received no complaints Monday night. Sounds reasonable, but I still note that Rich’s point about Limbaugh and the FCC still are unchallenged. I’ll update if I find anything else to corroborate or refute Rich’s claims I’ve quoted above, but for now you can consider them, with the exception of the ABC note, to be accurate.

Update 2: The Miami Herald notes:

WPVI in Philadelphia (Channel 6) logged more than 100 angry phone calls and 50 e-mails, a higher than average response, the station said. The NFL got about 200 complaints. The Eagles are unhappy, too.

Yeah, groundswell. 200 complaints to the NFL… earth shattering. Every article I’ve found about the FCC indicates that they’re not releasing the total number of complaints yet. Sounds like it’s policy, but it seems odd. So, not sure where Rich got that number.

Update 3: Ah, so several sites report the following:

Per FCC spokeswoman Rosemary Kimball, more than 50,000 comments have been received.

The FCC can’t yet say how many of those comments are complaints.

There we go.