The human nipple has outlasted another of its staunchest foes today, as SFGate reports that the Parents Television and Media Council, a “watchdog” group that was once on the cutting edge of asking “Won’t someone think of the children?” has now filed for bankruptcy. Indeed, the PTMC has fallen a long way from the halcyon days of 2004, when the group—having yet to modernize by adding this newfangled “media” to its name—claimed to have been one of the single biggest drivers of people complaining to the FCC about Janet Jackson’s breast being (mostly) exposed for (nearly) one entire second to Super Bowl viewers, an incident it straight-facedly called “an insult to every parent, every woman, and every child in America.”
Founded in 1995, the PTMC was the brainchild of L. Brent Bozell III, also founder of the still-running Media Research Center, a group that pushes narratives about left-wing bias in the media. (Would it shock you to know he’s currently Donald Trump’s nominee to be the American ambassador to South Africa?) Backed with the star power of an advisory board absolutely stacked with your great-grandparents’ least problematic faves, the PTMC spend thirty years complaining about any American TV that even remotely smacked of being sexually explicit or otherwise inappropriate by their standards. (Looking at you, Spin City.) They complained that TV rating guidelines weren’t strict enough. They went aggressively after guys like Seth MacFarlane, who once called getting letters from them like “getting hate mail from Hitler.” (Although MacFarlane later softened on the group, even conceding they might have a point about the number of jokes Family Guy deployed around sexual assault.) The PTMC even managed to modernize just enough to complain about YouTube—whose own prominence was famously also an unintended consequence of “Nipplegate”—and its willingness to run uncensored versions of Saturday Night Live‘s “Dick In The Box.” (Wait, can you write a whole history of American censorship at the turn of the century by charting viral Justin Timberlake moments? Someone should look into that.)
But the group lost its luster in the 2010s and beyond: Accusations of financial impropriety began circulating, and the organization was forced to subsist on such baby food outrage as getting mad at a TV show that had already self-censored itself as $hi! My Dad Says. The outrage surrounding Netflix film Cuties gave the group one last spasm of anger to coast off of, but, according to SFGate, they finally threw in the towel and declared bankruptcy on October 3. The group’s final missive, penned back in early September, suggests that even broken clocks that are really fixated on kids hearing swears can be in the right every once in a while, calling on Congress to do more to regulate tech companies who are peddling artificial intelligence chatbots to children.
