"Saving Private Ryan" is a triumphant cinematic march across the bloody battlefields of World War II. But the 1998 film starring Tom Hanks was defeated last night by skittish TV executives, including those at Pittsburgh's WTAE-Channel 4.
WTAE joined about 20 other ABC affiliates nationwide in choosing not to air the Veterans Day broadcast of Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning drama, instead replacing it with the Tom Cruise film "Far and Away."
Station managers feared the Federal Communications Commission would slap "significant" fines because soldiers in the movie use the "f-word" more than 48 times, said WTAE General Manager Rick Henry.
Welcome to the post-Janet Jackson world of broadcasting. Before Jackson bared her breast during the Super Bowl halftime show in January, "Saving Private Ryan" twice aired unedited on ABC and WTAE, on Veterans Day 2001 and 2002.
In many places, that won't happen again.
"That's absurd," said Jim Dugan, president of Soldiers & Sailors National Military Museum & Memorial in Oakland. He said the language in the movie is no worse than what can be found on any music video station.
Dugan, a Marine who served in Vietnam and the Gulf War, said "Saving Private Ryan" portrays accurately the language of the battlefield and added that he runs into young people today who have "fouler mouths than most of the GIs I've served with."
The exposure of Jackson's breast to a nation of football families kicked off a clamor for stricter control over what is broadcast on the public airwaves.
The FCC slapped a half-million-dollar fine on CBS for airing Jackson and fellow performer Justin Timberlake's racy show. In March, the FCC, under public pressure to clean up the airwaves, ruled that rock singer Bono's inadvertant on-air use of the "f-word" was both profane and indecent, drastically narrowing the circumstances within which a curse could be considered acceptable.
"I think we are in different times this year, in a different world," WTAE's Henry said. "The mood of the country is different since the Super Bowl. People are more sensitive, more concerned about this issue."
WTAE, along with the other 24 TV stations owned by Hearst-Argyle Television, lobbied ABC to allow them to air the movie after 10 p.m., when FCC rules are more relaxed. The movie is about three hours long, however, and starting it at 10 would have meant most of the movie would have aired after the 11 p.m. end of prime time, when advertising costs the most.
Anticipating the complaints that might arise, ABC persuaded U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a Vietnam veteran and former prisoner of war, to film an introduction to the movie and release a statement saying that the "film does not come close" to indecency because of its historical significance and the warnings ABC aired before the movie and during commercial breaks.
"The movie's the same. It hasn't changed" since ABC last aired it, said Dave Trabert, general manager of ABC affiliate WYTV-Channel 33 in Youngstown, Ohio, which aired the movie last night. WYTV is owned by New York-based Chelsey Broadcasting. "I don't think community standards changed because of what Janet Jackson did."
The American Family Association, a Tupelo, Miss.-based conservative Christian organization, pledged to get its members to file about 4,000 complaints with the FCC against stations that aired "Saving Private Ryan."
Parents can't constantly monitor their children so the responsibility of protecting them from televised profanity falls to ABC, said Randy Sharp, director of special projects for the association.
If networks are allowed to get away with "Saving Private Ryan," they'll continue to push the envelope and "next we'll have Victoria's Secret models with pasties and nothing else, not even the little angel wings," Sharp said. "We've got to protect those kids who don't have a solid, stable home."
Ryan Gancas, a former Marine who is now the chief operating office and historian for Soldiers & Sailors in Oakland, said he wouldn't want his youngest granddaughter, who is in second grade, to see the movie. At the same time, softening or sanitizing the image of war is a lie, said Gancas, who has authored several books on the Civil War.
"We as a country, our history portrays the grand uniforms, the flags rippling in the breeze, and the fair, nubile young ladies sending us off," he said. "Nobody talks about how this guy got hit and his guts fell out. This is what war is."
