After all the protests in anticipation of Wednesday's Victoria's Secret fashion show on CBS -- from animal-rights activists objecting to supermodel Gisele Bundchen's new fur endorsement deal, to complaints from women's groups on the left and right that the show amounted to little more than soft-core pornography -- fewer folks than last year were titillated enough to watch the program. Still, the lingerie show got a rise out of some people, as several hundred emailed complaints to the Federal Communications Commission, prompting FCC Commissioner Michael Copps to renew his calling for stricter indecency standards on broadcast TV.
Copps, one of five commissioners in charge of the FCC, and the only Democrat among them, has been outspoken in calling for more stringent scrutiny of programming. According to Reuters, he spoke to reporters Thursday in his Washington office, showing them his computer, which he said contained some 300 e-mails protesting the Victoria's Secret broadcast. He said the current standards let some objectionable programs slip through.
''The current definition of indecency to me should be capturing for enforcement purposes some of these programs and it is not,'' Copps said. ''We are only having a paucity of enforcement actions against programming that is palpably and demonstrably indecent.'' It's not clear, though, that the Victoria's Secret hour was ''demonstrably indecent'' -- current rules define indecency as sexual or excretory references that are patently offensive, and at any rate, Copps said he hadn't even watched the lingerie show.
Asked by EW.com to comment on the reaction of Copps and his e-mail correspondents to the Victoria's Secret fashion show, CBS spokesman Chris Ender responded with a prepared statement, saying, ''We are confident that the 'Victoria's Secret' special was completely within acceptable boundaries for broadcast television.''
Last year's Victoria's Secret show, on ABC, drew similar complaints and led to an FCC review that ultimately determined that the program did not violate indecency rules. That show drew about 12.4 million viewers, compared to 10.4 million for Wednesday's CBS broadcast, according to early Nielsen estimates. In fact, the show came in third in its timeslot, losing to the two-hour ''Bachelor'' finale on ABC (24.2 million viewers during the hour that overlapped with the fashion show) and ''The West Wing'' on NBC (14.9 million). Copps didn't say whether anyone had complained that even ''West Wing'' was more riveting than lingerie-clad supermodels.
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