Swearing on television

Question

'Swearing on television is increasing fast and "devastating" communication skills, according to a media watchdog Wednesday.'

Mediawatch UK claim that "Far from there being a natural evolution in language, there has been a consistent effort to promote obscenity, swearing and profanity against the wishes of most people"

The effect is devastation on "educational standards and communication skills".

The article doesn't tell us how swearing leads to diminished mental capacity.

Next week, I suppose, the report will be on wanking oneself blind. -- Simon R. Hughes

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Simon R. Hughes (Email Removed) burbled news:(Email Removed):
[nq:1]'Swearing on television is increasing fast and "devastating" communication skills, according to a media watchdog Wednesday.' Mediawatch UK ... is devastation on "educational standards and communication skills". The article doesn't tell us how swearing leads to diminished mental capacity.[/nq]
It broadcasts the message that nobody really cares about how anyone uses language or what language one uses. If that is true, then why should anyone who hasn't already learned the value of using language well bother themselves to improve their communication skills?

While I disagree that swearing, obscenity, and profanity automatically lead to diminished mental capacity, overuse of the lowest registers of the language certainly does not lead to increased mental capacity or more precise and clear communication, except in the most extreme circumstances.

This is one of those very sticky issues. While I am opposed to censorship in principle, I recognize that what children and adults see, hear, and read every day has an effect on them. It's no good to argue that X always affects everyone the same way, because that is not true. On the other hand, it is no good to argue that X has no effect on anyone, because that simply is not true. The reality of how X affects people is somewhere in the middle.

Mediawatch-UK is not my idea of an unbiased group of judges. They have their own moral, religious, and political agendae. Unfortunately, they use all these meaningless words to describe what they want to see in the media: "decent" and "tasteful" programs. Their definitions of these terms is never made explicit, but it's clear that what exists now on TV and in the movies is any but decent and tasteful. One of them did mention how horrified she was when Lady Chatterley's Lover was made into a film.

I know that many times my son will complain that he doesn't want to see what is offered on TV. He's too young to fully understand the ***, and I frankly would rather not have to watch TV erotica either--I just don't get excited watching movie stars trying to swallow each other's tongues. I usually turn away or change the channel during those scenes. If I want to watch graphic ***, then I will watch some hardcore ****. I will do the same for a lot of the violence in movies as well. I don't think there is any need to be so graphic. It never bothered me that old-time gangster and cowboy movies had a lot of gunfire but no blood. The action was about good versus evil not what does it look like when someone's head is cut off or how far does blood spurt from a major artery when it's severed. I find most of the *** and violence gratuitous, except in movies like Mad Max 2.

To get back to my son. He's a sensible little boy. He doesn't overeat and he doesn't like to watch graphically violent movies. But that's just about all there is on TV. He gets his taste from his own inner sense of values, not from anything his parents have specifically taught him. I suppose that will fall by the wayside the older he gets, though.

I think my son has more good sense than most of the people I know. He has no moral hangups about overeating or *** and vilence on TV. He just doesn't like either one. He knows intuitively that they are both bad. Why can't most people figure that out for themselves?

But we know from many decades of public television in the USA that most Americans are unwilling to pay for for quality programming on TV or the radio. They are satisfied enough with the mediocrity, imbecility, and tastelessness of mass culture. More power to them. One becomes what one ingests, and a steady diet of trash turns one into trash. Mass communications is trash communications, by definition. But what the Mediawatch people would have us watch is undoubtedly only stuff that would pass muster in Sunday school. How boring.
[nq:1]Next week, I suppose, the report will be on wanking oneself blind.[/nq]

Swearing on television

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