Wes Vernon
Wednesday, Sept. 5, 2001

"I’d say about 10 years ago they made a severe cut in those departments,” Accuracy In Media (AIM) President Reed Irvine told NewsMax.com.

"The basic question at the annual meetings at that time was whether or not this was the camel getting its nose under the tent and going down the slippery slope to where X-rated material would be aired on broadcast networks. And they all denied that was in the wind at all, but it’s the way things are going.”

Irvine, for years, has been attending the annual shareholder meetings of the major broadcast networks and leading newspapers.

The producer of NBC's "The West Wing” told the Times he would insert into a script a character taking the Lord’s name in vain.

"We’re seeing a coarsening of our society,” Irvine said in reaction to that. "I don’t know how long it’s been since we had a president that didn’t swear or tell off-color jokes. But up until this time, it has never been considered fitting and proper that, just because it’s ‘reality’ it deserves to be put out throughout the country.”

Remember, he cautioned, children pick it up. "When I was growing up, if you used the cuss words, you got your mouth washed out with soap.”

There are those who liked to break through barriers, the AIM boss acknowledged, "but what do you do if everybody uses the ‘F’ word constantly? What do they do next?”

As for the broadcast network argument that the cable networks have made big money by breaking those barriers:

Irvine sees that as a serious problem, where "everything is reduced to the lowest common denominator,” but the cable channels are not reaching the same number of people that the broadcast networks are reaching.

So should families just "tune it out”?

A lot of people are already doing that and will continue to do so, but "The question is that with TV sets in several rooms of the house, how do you keep the standards up for your family?”

Irvine says that whenever prime-time TV goes into the gutter, his wife reminds him, "Do you remember when Jack Paar was punished for using the word 'toilet'?”

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