Six Things We Weren’t Supposed to Know about Early TV Viewers

By Deborah L. Jaramillo, author of The Television Code: Regulating the Screen to Safeguard the Industry. 

Revisiting early debates about TV content and censorship from industry and government perspectives, Deborah L. Jaramillo's book recounts the development of the Television Code, the TV counterpart to the Hays Motion Picture Production Code.

Tucked away in the National Archives at College Park are the papers of the Federal Communications Commission. Resting there peacefully are letters—stacks and stacks of

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letters—from radio listeners and TV viewers. The Television Code: Regulating the Screen to Safeguard the Industry showcases some of these letters to illustrate viewers’ stake in the development of television. Not all of the letters could make it into the book, though, so this is the perfect space to highlight some of the stranger complaints, demands, and suggestions directed at the FCC and other government bodies. Take, for example, the viewers who wrote to President Truman to resurrect Liberace’s TV show—a funny tactic that might have more success these days. There was also the man who wanted a clock to appear on screen at all times—a practical suggestion, if silly in its earnestness. Then there was the guy who wanted TV shows “to quit destroying the harmless myth of Santa Claus.” Guess who he blamed! Jewish comedians. In no time at all, a seemingly benign letter can reveal some ugly realities, which makes reading these letters quite an eye-opening experience. Intended not for our eyes but for the eyes of the FCC in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the letters described below had one common thread. They were all upset with this new technology called TV.

1
I’m Bored 

In 1951 a man from Pennsylvania demanded the FCC take action to improve the offerings on his local NBC affiliate. He wrote that the “same pictures and stories” had “really become very boresome indeed.” There were a number of reasons to be bored with TV in 1951. Because the FCC stalled TV’s growth in 1948 to sort out some engineering problems, most of the country had either one channel or no service at all. A concerted effort by the Hollywood studios to block the flow of top films to TV also meant that stations reran the same old movies, rankling viewers who expected something better. Angry that they had laid down their hard-earned dollars for a new TV set only to find limited service, viewers wrote to the FCC demanding that they fix things. Although our letter writer was correct to seek out the FCC to resolve the inadequate state of TV service, the Commission could have no hand in fixing his other complaint: “rotten and lousy wrestling matches.” 

2
Culinary Fraud 

Just as we all did at one time, radio listeners had to learn to become television viewers. Anyone who has watched a cooking show understands that the “magic of television” means prepared food appears minutes after the cooking process begins. While not a primary concern for viewers, at least one woman bristled at this televisual sleight of hand. A regular viewer of Josephine McCarthy’s cooking show wrote to the FCC and accused the host of “practicing fraud.” Distressed by the deception that unfolded before her eyes every morning on her NBC station—and seeking protection from it—this viewer faulted McCarthy for passing off “as her own creations food that she never cooked at all during the program.” Media literacy is a real thing, folks.

3
Justice for Dentists

Most people want to be represented on TV in fair, accurate, and nuanced ways. A few letters in the archive protested hateful representations of minorities, and, yes, some protested positive representations of minorities. As some viewers grappled with the state of race relations and the role TV would play in bringing different cultures into living rooms, one in particular was preoccupied with the representation of an estimable but embattled calling: the field of dentistry. Concerned about the “unpleasant dental scenes” in The Paul Winchell Show and The Alan Young Show, one dentist implored the FCC to limit the sort of portrayal that soured viewers on trips to their local dental professional. After all, according to the letter writer, visits to the dentist had truly become “a pleasant experience.”

4

Women! Am I Right?

The bulk of letters complaining about TV dwelled on indecency and violence. Cries of indecency, for the most part, were thinly veiled outbursts of sexism. The targeting of female performers and personalities transcended nitpicking about low necklines or suggestive dance routines. From their behavior to the mere fact of their presence, women constantly offended viewers. Lucille Ball’s pregnancy, worked into the comedy of I Love Lucy, so incensed one family that they “pulled the main switch and lit the house with candles until the program was over.” The sight of female wrestlers on TV was also, for one viewer, “the very level of degradation.” Another called one such show “a disgusting and degrading exhibition,” as well as a “revolting spectacle” worthy of investigation by the FCC. Neither a pregnant comedian nor a professional wrestler, Meet the Press moderator Martha Rountree still managed to unsettle one man. Ignorant of the fact that Rountree created MTP, this viewer felt she “cluttered up” the show. His advice: “Put a full size man into this man’s job and you’ll have a real set up.” Coincidentally, Meet the Press has not had a permanent female moderator since Rountree.

5
Welcome to the Schedule 

The insertion of television into daily life meant that viewers like our cooking-show friend had to learn not just how programs were constructed but how stations and networks shaped their lineups. The schedule has always been a site of strategic planning, involving lead-ins, tentpoles, and counterprogramming. Early viewers lucky enough to have more than one station in their hometowns got a taste of this competitive scheduling, but the abundance of programming presented new problems. Without the benefit of video recorders, what would they do if they wanted to watch two shows airing at the same time? One viewer appealed to the FCC. “What ails television,” this viewer wrote, “[is] not enough good shows and when [the] hour arrives for good shows, stations compete in same hours. Television viewers [are] cheated.” Fortunately, the television networks quickly learned the value of the rerun.

6
Ahead of Their Time 

The beauty of over-the-air broadcasting is its wide reach. Radio and television’s ability to access and appeal to a mass audience has located these media at the center of social, cultural, and political life. And regulatory decisions made in the 1920s located advertisers at the center of broadcasting. Whereas radio made limited room for viable noncommercial stations, entrenched interests—both industrial and regulatory—ensured that “television” would be synonymous with “commerce.” A mass audience meant big money, but it also meant a varied programming slate. Narrowcast channels, or entire channels targeting specific audiences with defined tastes (think Food Network or ESPN), would not emerge on a large scale until cable television’s channel capacity and revenue streams allowed for such experimentation. Early television viewers already had narrowcasting on their minds, however. In 1950 one exasperated viewer asked the FCC to “let the ballgames have their own station.” A savvy nine-year-old viewer ran with this idea and prescribed an entire system of niche channels in 1951. “I think each channel should have the same thing,” he wrote. His channel lineup? Channel 2: Westerns. Channel 3: Cartoons. Channel 4: Cooks. Channel 5: Educational Programs. Channel 6: Clothes. Channel 7: Languages. Channel 8: Plays. Channel 9: Wrestling. Channel 10: Sports. Channel 11: Planets. But for the final part of his master plan—a less “noisy” type of sponsor—this kid might have had a future in the TV business.

All letters can be found in the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, MD.

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Banned Books Week: On Translating a Controversial Work

Banned Books Week (Sept. 24-30) is the book world’s annual celebration of our right to choose and have access to the books that we want to read. Run by the American Library Association, libraries, bookstores, and the online book community will use this week to host events, highlight banned books, and spotlight the conversation about the real and pressing issue of book censorship in communities around the world. 

Censorship in modern day Egypt has severely restricted the freedoms of artists and writers. In the fall of 2014, a young writer named Ahmed Naji's novel Istikhdam al-haya was published in Arabic to acclaim in Egypt and the wider Arab world. But in 2016, Naji was sentenced to two years in prison after a reader complained that an excerpt published in a literary journal harmed public morality. His imprisonment marks the first time in modern Egypt that an author has been jailed for a work of literature. Writers like Zadie Smith and literary organizations around the world rallied to support Naji; he won the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award after his imprisonment. Naji was released in December 2016, but his original conviction was overturned in May 2017. At this time, he is awaiting retrial and banned from leaving Egypt.

We are proud to partner with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin to distribute the English translation of Naji's novel Using Life to give the work the international readership it deserves. As Zadie Smith wrote in The New York Review of Books:

“Using Life is a riotous novel about a failing state, a corrupt city, a hypocritical authority, but it is also about tequila shots and getting laid and smoking weed with your infuriating girlfriend and debating whether rock music died in the Seventies and if Quentin Tarantino is a genius or a fraud. It’s a young man’s book. A young man whose youth is colliding with a dark moment in history.”

The original Arabic publication Istikhdam al-haya

Our English translation, available for pre-order now

Set in modern-day Cairo, Using Life follows a young filmmaker, Bassam Bahgat, after a 
secret society hires him to create a series of documentary films about the urban planning and architecture of Cairo. The plot in which Bassam finds himself ensnared unfolds in the novel’s unique mix of text and black-and-white illustrations. The Society of Urbanists, Bassam discovers, is responsible for centuries of world-wide conspiracies that have shaped political regimes, geographical boundaries, reigning ideologies, and religions. It is responsible for today’s Cairo, and for everywhere else, too. Yet its methods are subtle and indirect: it operates primarily through manipulating urban architecture, rather than brute force. As Bassam immerses himself in the Society and its shadowy figures, he finds Cairo on the brink of a planned apocalypse, designed to wipe out the whole city and rebuild anew.

The English translation comes out December 2017. To celebrate, we're excerpting the translator's note by Benjamin Koerber below. You can also read an essay he wrote for The New Inquiry in May of last year: "Using Life: Instructions for Play," and Naji's most "offensive" chapter from Using Life is excerpted on arablit.org. 

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

By Benjamin Koerber

Using Life (Istikhdam al-haya in Arabic) has been the victim of some infamous misinterpretations. In late 2015, its author, Ahmed Naji, was referred to a Cairo criminal court after an earlier version of two chapters appeared in the prestigious Egyptian literary journal Akhbar al-Adab. The charge of “harming public morals” was based, ostensibly, on the testimony of a private citizen who suffered a “drop in blood pressure” after encountering the text’s sexually explicit language. There is, in reality, nothing remarkable about the obscenities in Using Life, and language far more explicit has appeared often in both contemporary and classical Arabic literature. Most observers considered the case absurd, all the more so when the prosecution appeared to have mistaken this work of fiction for a personal confession of acts committed by the author. Nonetheless, after an earlier acquittal, a higher court sentenced Ahmed Naji to the maximum of two years in prison. This marks the first time in modern Egypt that an author has been jailed for a work of fiction. After ten months in prison, and an international campaign of solidarity, Naji was released pending an appeal. The original sentence was finally overturned in May, 2017. At the time of writing, his case is awaiting retrial.

Perhaps ironically, such direct and draconian displays of state power are largely peripheral to the novel’s core critical concerns. Instead, Using Life directs the reader’s gaze at the more subtle mechanisms of repression and constraint at work in contemporary Egypt: the perfidy of friends and lovers, the “kitschification” of culture, and, most importantly, conspiracies wrought in the realm of architecture and urban planning. The book is a response, in the first place, to the utterly unlivable state of today’s Cairo—“a miserable, hideous, filthy, rotten, dark, oppressive, be•sieged, lifeless, enervating, polluted, overcrowded, impoverished, angry, smoke-filled, simmering, humid, trashy, shitty, choleric, anemic mess of a city,” according to the protagonist, Bassam Bahgat. Let the reader be aware that among the city’s current residents, Bassam’s feelings are far from unusual. Cairo’s decades-old crises in housing, electricity, waste management, and traffic (to name a few) have left the city both physically and psychologically scarred, and have remained unresolved amidst the waves of revolution and counterrevolution unleashed since January 25, 2011. The intervention of the security services into urban planning has disfigured the city even further: unbreachable metal sidewalk fences, forcibly depopulated public spaces, and huge con•crete block walls constructed in the middle of major streets are now familiar sights around the capital.

Yet as parts of Cairo have shut down, new aesthetic practices have emerged over the last decade to open new spaces for expression, as well as to repurpose old ones. Graffiti artists have laid claim to the city’s walls and barriers. Comedians and cartoonists have attracted cult followings through YouTube, and bloggers have emerged from the obscurity of their bedrooms to pioneer new literary genres (see, for example, Ghada Abdel Aal’s I Want to Get Married! [2008; trans. Eltahawy, 2010]). In fashion, advertising, and graphic design, independent artists have made spectacular interventions in fields typically dominated by foreign brands.

In Using Life, Naji, together with illustrator Ayman Al Zorkany, has managed to synthesize many elements of this resurgent urban culture into something that is more than just a novel. Its publication in November 2014 was followed by the sale of t-shirts, coffee mugs, and a variety of accessories featuring Al Zorkany’s illustrations, which the artist has also developed into a short film entitled “The Last Dance of the Blue Anus-Fly.” As a book, Using Life follows a number of recent experiments in graphic fiction in Egypt and the wider Arab world, such as Metro (El-Shafee, 2008; trans. Rossetti, 2012) and Fi Shaqqat Bab al-Luq (The apartment in Bab al-Louq) (Maher, Ganzeer, and Nady, 2014); as a literary-graphic hybrid, it resembles most closely Hilal Chouman’s Limbo Beirut (2013; trans. Stanton, 2016). In spite of these affinities, it remains a highly idiosyncratic work, whose style and content can best be understood as the product of its author’s and illustrator’s aesthetic sensibilities and professional backgrounds. Naji, whose former digital avatar “Bisu” was a renowned trickster and collector of oddities in the early years of Egypt’s blogosphere (2004– 2009), has since become known for his assorted creative and critical works, including his novel Rogers (2007), his “history” of Egypt’s blogger subculture (2010), and his contributions as editor of the prestigious literary review Akhbar al-Adab. Ayman Al Zorkany’s background in illustration, costume design, and adver•tising places him outside the jealously guarded borders of Egypt’s literary establishment, and thus pushes Using Life well beyond reigning definitions of the Arabic novel.

Portions of Using Life are indeed “graphic” in both senses of the word, and this presents the reader and the translator with special challenges. While it is hoped that the English reader will approach the depictions of sexuality, drug use, and urban rot with greater forbearance than the Cairene prosecutor, it is inevitable that certain images or expressions may not fit comfortably with everyone’s tastes. In this respect, the reader is urged to bear in mind that certain words in the novel’s vocabulary—e.g., “balls” (bidan), “ass-kissing” (taʿris), and “cocksuckery” (khawlana)— have a different sort of currency, and inhabit a somewhat different web of associations, in the Arabic original. Moreover, while such words are certainly marks of an “attitude,” their transposition into a foreign idiom will make it difficult to draw wholly accurate assumptions about a speaker’s social status, intelligence, or political leanings. These qualifications apply equally to the novel’s illustrations. Sometimes, an image’s local significance will be grasped easily enough: to paraphrase William S. Burroughs, a rat is a rat is a rat is a rat, is a police officer. At other times, one will have to be thoroughly immersed in Egyptian popular culture to know that a scientific description of cockroaches, for example, is a jab at the mercurial public intellectual Mustafa Mahmoud.

. . . 

I owe a tremendous amount of gratitude to those many who have assisted in the present translation. Special thanks are due to Wendy Moore, publications editor for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas, for her tireless efforts and support at all hours and stages of the project. Dena Afrasiabi, publications editor for CMES, performed extraordinary and brilliant work in guiding the book through the intense final stretch. Series editor Tarek El-Ariss was, long ago, the first to recommend this book to me and recognize the importance of its translation; he has been a constant source of inspiration, insight, magic, and mirth at all levels of its development. I thank Marcia Lynx Qualey (ArabLit.org) for providing many helpful comments and suggestions on the offending Chapter Six, generously promoting Using Life and the work of Ahmed Naji on a truly global scale, and facilitating my public debut in the Arabic translation community. For his brilliant insights into the finer points of Arabic-English translation, many illuminating conversations on the worlds summoned in this novel, and support and sustenance along the way, I offer my utmost gratitude, thanks, and cat memes to Ehab Elshazly. I owe an unpayable debt to the anonymous reviewer who went above and beyond the ordinary duties of that role to offer very helpful and much needed guidance on nearly every aspect of this translation; while any remaining faults are my own, this reviewer’s insights and suggestions have had a significant impact on the final product.

Most of all, I would like to thank Ahmed Naji and Ayman Al Zorkany for welcoming me into the worlds they have created, help•ing me adapt, and not minding when I run off to play on my own.

#FreeNaji

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Censorship in Comics for Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week (September 27 through October 3, 2015) is the book community’s annual opportunity to celebrate the freedom to read, and draw attention to those who hinder that right. Intellectual freedom is a core value of our mission; and the freedom to read is as integral to that value as the freedom to publish. 

This year's theme is Young Adult fiction—one of the most regularly challenged categories of books in libraries and schools across the country. We don't publish young adult fiction, but we are launching a new comic book studies series called World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction Series with Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González as series editors. The series will include monographs and edited volumes that focus on the analysis and interpretation of comic books and graphic nonfiction from around the world. Books published in the series will bring analytical approaches from such fields as literature, art history, cultural studies, communication studies, media studies, and film studies, among others to help define the comic book studies field at a time of great vitality and growth.

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The Association of American University Presses is an official sponsor of Banned Books Week. To join the conversation, we're posting an excerpt from a recent issue of The Velvet Light Trap dealing with censorship in the comic book industry. To read Shawna Kidman's piece in full, you can access it through Project Muse, visit your local library, or purchase a single issue of The Velvet Light Trap on our website.

Contribute to the banned books conversation on social media with the hashtags #bannedbooks and #bannedbooksweek.

"Self-Regulation through Distribution: Censorship and the Comic Book Industry in 1954"
By Shawna Kidman

In the early 1950s, comic books boasted a readership of over seventy million Americans, each of whom consumed an average of six comics a month. There were two comic books published for every one book, with each copy likely passed on to more than three readers. And then, quite suddenly, the market crashed. Between 1954 and 1955, sales plummeted by 50 percent, from eighty million copies each month to just forty million. By 1956 more than half of the extant publishers had closed their doors, and two-thirds of the six hundred titles appearing monthly on newsstands had vanished.1 Just like that, comic books went from being one of the most popular forms of entertainment in America to a medium struggling for its survival.2

At the very same moment, as the comic book market was beginning its dramatic decline, the medium was undergoing a crisis in the political sphere. Psychiatrists, church officials, members of PTAs, and local politicians had for years been trying to link comic books to juvenile delinquency, illiteracy, and moral corruption. Finally, in the spring of 1954, the government got involved, and the Senate Judiciary Committee held televised hearings on the comic book industry and its alleged corruption of America’s youth. Pressured by this public relations disaster and the threat of local and state censorship, the major comic book publishers joined forces to form the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA). This trade organization drafted a code of self-censorship and created an administrative body to enforce it known as the Comics Code Authority (CCA). Like the Production Code Administration (PCA) created by Hollywood twenty years earlier, the CCA would issue a seal of approval to those titles it deemed morally appropriate. Heavily promoted by the industry, this response seemed to satisfy government officials and consumers alike; within the year, interest in the controversy had faded almost entirely from public view.3 But the dramatic decline in sales was already well under way.

Most writers have characterized the anti-comics crusade and the simultaneous market crash in primarily cultural terms, drawing a causal link between these two events. The episode has been sensationalized in many journalistic accounts, which create a hero and villain respectively in the figures of EC Comics publisher Bill Gaines, an innovator responsible for “some of the best comic books ever published,” and Fredric Wertham, an “insane” psychiatrist who told “apocalyptic” lies about the dangers of mass media.4 In this version of the story, the Senate or “EC hearings” are recast as a trial on taste, Bill Gaines is understood as their “principal target,” and Wertham is accused of censoring Gaines right “out of existence.”5 Scholars meanwhile tend to point to social trends, blaming the controversy on McCarthyism; seething generational battles; culture wars rooted in class, money, religion, and politics; and fundamental struggles over “who had the right and the responsibility to shape American culture.”6 With a focus on comic book content or the cultural milieu, many of these descriptions marginalize the market crash itself, which is depicted as merely a side effect of censorship. Some have even argued that the anti-comics crusade was “almost solely responsible for the drastic decline in sales and the near death of the industry during the 1950s.”7

Figure 1. Comics Code Authority Seal, 1954. For more than three decades, this seal from the CCA would grace the cover of the majority of comic books sold in America.

Too often left out of these historical accounts is the way in which both censorship and shrinking audiences are fundamentally also industrial, economic, and political occurrences. Censorship in particular often seems like an issue that is primarily value-based and culturally contingent. However, in the context of mass media, the regulation of content necessarily involves vast and powerful infrastructures of enforcement capable of containing the inherent disorderliness of popular culture. So while we should not give up on analyzing the texts and ideologies at the center of media censorship, it is equally important to consider the material foundations that support systems of both restriction and circulation. More broadly, as Philip Napoli has noted, it is possible to use the political economy of media as a useful “foundation of knowledge for a wide range of important scholarly inquiries into the behaviors of media industries, as well as the broader political and cultural ramifications of these behaviors.”8 A better understanding of the industrial context in which most media is produced and initially circulated can lead to a more profound insight into all aspects of culture, including its active consumption, transformation, and recirculation by audiences and fans, the latter of which has been a particular interest of comic book studies.9

Your Freedom to Read: 13 Links for Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week (Sept. 21-27) is the book world’s annual celebration of our right to choose and have access to the books that we want to read. Libraries, bookstores, and the online book community will use this week to host events, highlight banned books, and spotlight the conversation about the real and pressing issue of book censorship in communities across the nation. 

This year the Banned Books Week National Committee has chosen to emphasize the censorship, banning, and challenging of comics and graphic novels because “Despite their serious literary merit and popularity as a genre, they are often subject to censorship,” Judith Platt, chair of the Banned Books Week National Committee, said in a statement about this year’s effort.

UT Press wants to be a part of this effort. We hope you’ll think about not only the impact that banned books have had on you, but the consequences for communities that deny access to certain books. We hope you’ll show your support to those who stand up year-round to protect your freedom to choose the books that you want to read. This year we present to you a list of 13 things you can read, watch, check out, or do, to get engaged with Banned Books Week 2014. 

This article details a case this summer in which the College of Charleston in South Carolina was threatened with budget cuts for featuring a graphic novel, Fun Home, on an optional summer reading list

 

21 stories about comics that have been banned in the US