FCC investigating Jackson's Super Bowl halftime exposure
Entertainment suffers from outrageous excess
Justin and Janet Steal Super Bowl Show, According to TiVo
There was a football game on Sunday, wasn't there? (Quick- who won and what was the final score??) You almost wouldn't have known it, judging by the opinionating and rhetorical excess emanating forth from all quarters of the media jungle. All of this over one lone breast flapping in the breeze.
SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 2 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson top the show during Sunday's Super Bowl, attracting almost twice as many viewers as the most thrilling moments on the field, according to an annual measurement of second-by-second viewership in TiVo households.
The Jackson-Timberlake moment drew the biggest spike in audience reaction TiVo has ever measured. TiVo said viewership spiked up to 180 percent as hundreds of thousands of households used TiVo's unique capabilities to pause and replay live television to view the incident again and again. Overall, the halftime extravaganza had a powerful grip on viewers. According to TiVo's analysis of aggregated data from an anonymous sample of 20,000 households, viewership of the game's intermission increased by 12 percent compared to last year's halftime show.
Quelle: TiVo Inc.
Now Congress and the FCC are joining the breast-beating, and both CBS and MTV are in full damage-control mode. Yes, it was distasteful and it was over the top, but what, really, could anyone have expected? A "wardrobe malfunction"? Yeah, right....
What about the rest of the halftime show? If memory serves, it wasn't exactly a family-hour-quality production. It was lewd, it was lascivious, and it was about as subtly sexual as walking into your parent's bedroom and finding them in flagrante delicto. NFL officials have said repeatedly that they closely monitored rehearsals all week long...so just what in the hell was it that they were they watching?
Look, I'm not at all offended by Janet Jackson's exposed breast. To me, it was merely a denouement to a halftime that went well-beyond borderline distasteful. This was a halftime show; was the not-so-subtle sexual innuendo REALLY necessary? Of course not. Paul Tagliabue can hold forth about how inappropriate it all was, but in the end isn't NFL management ultimately responsible? The NFL controls virtually every official aspect of Super Bowl week to the Nth degree. For them to decry the unfairness and inappropriateness of it all seem rather disingenuous.
A bared breast, in my estimation, is neither disgusting nor pornographic. It is merely a part of the human body, and should be appreciated as such, What IS disgusting and borderline pornographic is a half-time show that with a gratuitously and deliberately heavily sexualized theme. Prior to the show, MTV had promised "shocking moments", a description deliberately vague enough to mean just about anything or nothing at all.
Let's lose the hypocrisy and the faux righteous indignation, shall we? On the scale of things to be upset over, a bared breast ranks pretty low. I think we could all do better by realizing that the real problem here is the eroding of boundaries- both of good taste and acceptability. Is this what we want our children learning- that sexuality is best when flaunted? I have no desire to be a prude or to force my views on anyone, but there is something to be said for allowing your audeince to use their imaginations.
Of course, if you really want something else to be upset about from the Super Bowl, try this one on for size:
HOUSTON -- The second-half kickoff of the Super Bowl was delayed after a man dressed as a referee ran onto the field, stripped down to a G-string and shoes, then started dancing at the 30-yard line.
New England Patriots linebacker Matt Chatham leveled the man as he ran from security personnel. The man, who had the name of a gambling website scribbled across his chest, was hogtied and carried off the field by police.
CBS didn't air the intruder to the worldwide television audience, focusing its cameras elsewhere as the man was being chased.
After all, we were treated to far more than just a naked breast and some sexual innuendo, no?? Somehow, CBS saw fit not to air the footage of this sorry exhibition. You'd think they could have done the same with the halftime show.
Man, whatever happened to marching bands??
