NFL Exposed For What It Is
By Sally Jenkins
Tuesday, February 3, 2004; Page D01
We have two new federal investigations in this country: One into weapons of mass destruction, and, now, thanks to the Super Bowl halftime show, one into weapons of mass distraction.
I'm so glad to hear the Federal Communications Commission is launching an inquiry into the halftime show. No doubt FCC Chairman Michael K. Powell is determined to follow the facts wherever they lead, but it's going to take a lot of legwork and subpoenas and hearings if we're going to delve into the hidden and scandalous truth that the NFL is a -- television program.
The blame game has begun. CBS, MTV and a slew of spokespeople are pointing fingers at each other over Justin Timberlake's ripping away of Janet Jackson's bodice on national TV to reveal that she has, in fact, a breast. (Lord knows what might have happened if the world discovered she has two of them.) No doubt most of the fingers will be aimed at Timberlake and Jackson for further eroding our society. It's that dangerous rap music that makes kids behave this way, right? But I'd rather point my own finger directly at the league. If the Super Bowl halftime show was offensive and unsuitable for family viewing, I blame Paul Tagliabue and his fellow marketing executives at the NFL. It was their show, start to finish.
Maybe now we'll finally grasp the fact that the league is just another mass entertainment company, the Viacom of sports.
For years NFL marketers have preyed on the sensibilities of the nation to sell their sponsors' products. They have appropriated sex, patriotism, war and even the tragedy of Sept. 11 as commercial vehicles, and used them all to peddle more Coors and cars. You can always count on the NFL, during any legitimate national outpouring of sincerity, to seize on the topic of the day and bend it as a selling tool, along with breasty cheerleaders, Britney Spears and faux-militarism, in search of higher ratings and ad revenues. A 30-second Super Bowl spot now costs $2.3 million. So for the league to be suddenly shocked and indignant at the behavior of a bunch of MTV entertainers it hired in partnership with CBS to boost its cool points and halftime ratings is utterly disingenuous, and craven. Exactly what did the league expect when it rented the MTV culture?
What happened during the halftime show was that a bunch of leering, irreverent scream-voiced rock stars decided to make the NFL pay for its pretensions and profit-seeking. Let there be no dispute about one thing: of course Timberlake meant to do it, and of course it was part of the act, otherwise why was she wearing a piece of jewelry that looked like a silver sunburst on her nipple? What do they take us for? But whether you were offended by Kid Rock's shredded American flag shirt, or Nelly grabbing his crotch at every opportunity, or Timberlake's bump and grind with Jackson, the point was obvious: Let's commandeer the audience of a hundred million for ourselves. And let's exploit their fun-for-whole-family-and while-you're-at-it-buy-a-Ford-or-Cadillac sensibility. And you know what? The league had it coming.
Timberlake's ripping of Jackson's bustier was the equivalent of mooning the teacher. It's juvenile -- but it works. It was also straight out of the Spears playbook: Give Madonna a kiss with an open mouth and everyone will talk about you. Never mind that we're in a primary season, that a kid got shot to death at Ballou High and we have a trillion dollar budget deficit.
Let's talk about Janet Jackson's breast. The NFL knows full well that MTV was the network responsible for Madonna and Spears. Just a few days after her Madonna interlude, Spears appeared on the NFL's Kickoff Day festivities. The league didn't suddenly develop amnesia about MTV. Timberlake and Jackson merely sent the lumber downstream, gave the NFL and its network partners what they were asking for -- only they gave them too much of it.
On days like this, I miss Howard Cosell. I miss his cold appraisals and scathing judgments, and I can't help wondering what he would have made of the halftime show. Instead, we had CBS announcer Greg Gumble's silence, broken by one sniggering attempt to cute-ify what had just happened on stage. I suspect that if Cosell were there, he'd have said that while the Super Bowl halftime was a piece of soft porn theater, it was perhaps no more or less offensive than, say, trivializing the Columbia catastrophe with a song and a dance and a phony astronaut planting a flag on a fake moon.
Cosell was arguably the last legitimate journalist in sports broadcasting, and he spent the final years of his life railing against the "unholy alliances" between the major professional leagues and the networks. In his view, the networks had become solely concerned with event programming and protecting the leagues, rather than covering them and reporting the news. It was all an entertainment package, he claimed. "They want shills," he barked. Then, he was labeled a crank. Now he seems prescient.
The NFL tried to use MTV, and got used back. The league wanted it both ways, was willing to borrow some edgy, sexy entertainers from the music network, but wanted them to water down their performances and material to suit the league's image and mainstream network audience. The league sells sex as subtext, in the form of cheerleaders, or halftime shows with scantily clad girl singers, or in suggestive beer commercials. But it doesn't want breasts on center stage. That way it can claim the Super Bowl is safe viewing for the kids.
Good for Jackson and Timberlake for putting a breast smack in the middle of things: The NFL finally got a little payback for its manipulations. That's what the FCC investigation, and your own common sense, should conclude.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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