Mr. Johnson's current concerns were expressed in an article in a January 2002 issue of The Nation ["Take This Media . . . Please!," The Nation, Jan. 7, 2002]; Mr. Jencks are contained in this January 2002 talk to the CBS Alumni Club.

Mr. Jencks' talk has been selected and posted because of the public policy significance of this statement from a former major U.S. television executive. He addresses the creative and cultural consequences of today's growing media merger movement, currently unrestrained -- indeed, virtually unexamined -- by Congress, the FCC, or other government agencies.

The speech text is copyright, 2002, by Richard W. Jencks, and was reproduced here and posted to Nicholas Johnson's Web site with the permission of Richard W. Jencks on January 30, 2002. Any use beyond a single individual's reading, linking to, or printing out one copy of the text requires the prior approval of Richard W. Jencks. You may contact Mr. Jencks via Nicholas Johnson at njohnson@inav.net -- N.J., January 30, 2002]

It so happened that my wife and I were personally acquainted with the target of Mr. Rickles' remark. We had helped coach her for what she might encounter at a large reception CBS had staged not long before at the Corcoran Museum in Washington. She was a lovely, slim, quiet spoken woman -- quite shy and a little insecure -- not at all sure what the duties of a major league corporate wife would entail. My wife Mary's reaction to Mr. Rickles' remark was to get up from the table and leave the party for good. Perhaps I should have done likewise, but I did not consider that I should seem to publicly reproach my colleagues at the network. Also, I was reluctant to leave a table at which there were friends who were valuable CBS affiliates, as well as Bea Arthur, the star of the new CBS series Maude.

At this time the reigning star of situation comedy in all of television was CBS' Mary Tyler Moore, playing the role of Mary Richards. Mary Richards, you may recall, was the lissome, adorable, insecure but spunky, straight arrow employee of a television station. The significance of the comedy was that Mary Richards was a pioneering woman in a male world. The reason why someone like Don Rickles could be so very successful with his shtick was that the general climate of popular culture was, by today' s standards, so very wholesome. These days Mary Richards, whose love life was unambitious, to say the least, has morphed into Ally McBeal. Ally, like almost all single women portrayed on television these days, makes promiscuity cute and fashionable. She sometimes beds down with complete strangers. It is not clear to me that the transition from Mary Rjchards to Ally McBeal represents an advance for womens' rights. Even so, Ally McBeal is not in a class with Boston Public. That Fox show, broadcast during what used to be called the Family Hour, not long ago offered a story line in which a female candidate for class president performed oral sex on a male counterpart in exchange for his support.

What on earth could Don Rickles say now, assuming he is still around, to shock an audience of television affiliates? In the last decade of the milleruum alone, on a per hour basis, sexual content more than tripled, and foul language was five and a half times more frequent at the end of the decade than at the beginning.

What explains this change? I daresay that none of us think that The Honeymooners would have been improved by the addition of sexual content or foul language. Besides, Alice wouldn't have permitted it. Nor would Sid Caesar have become more entertaining, or Sergeant Bilko. Would Gunsmoke have been a better Western if Kitty were seen in her bed with Matt Dillon, or with other clients, in the early -- or perhaps the later -- stages of sexual foreplay? A remake of Gunsmoke this year would surely give that idea a whirl.

A lot of this has to do, of course, with the death of the television and motion picture Codes, partly at the hands of the government. In the movies it was replaced by a rating system, jointly devised by Jack Valenti for the producers and Sumner Redstone for the theatre owners, in which it became imperative for studios to put enough sex and violence into a film to obtain a titillating "R" rating. At the same time, theatres did little or nothing to discourage child attendance at R rated films, and their ads for such films actively targeted children -- a fact which Congress seemed to discover only last year. This newly created appetite for the violent and licentious fed into the rebellion of the young against their parents which was a product of the Vietnam War turmoil.

I remember, about fifteen years ago, discussing with a high school student the opportunity he had been offered to go as an intern to Washington. He was slated to work in Al Gore's office. I told him I thought it was a wonderful opportunity. Very presciently -- almost -- I told him that Gore was likely to be President. He said he wasn't interested, and I asked why. He said it was because of Tipper Gore's campaign against obscenity in music lyrics, which, after all, only amounted to putting warning labels on record jackets. I was astounded that this young man, well spoken, well brought up, should so construe a mild campaign against obscenity as an attack upon his own personal freedom. Obscenity was a part of the culture that he cherished.

May the changes in popular culture have to do with the sheer size of the vast media oligopolies than came to dominate the entertainment scene since the mid 1980's, headed by figures who in their power and reach dwarfed Paley and Sarnoff and Goldenson? Might it reside in the kind of attention, or lack of attention, that controlling owners of media oligopolies now gave to their media holdings?

As of today, the most powerful entertainment oligarch is Sumner Redstone. I quote from his book, A Passion to Win, released last year by his own book publisher, Simon & Shuster:

My industry reaches the hearts and minds of tremendous numbers of people, and no one matches Viacom for its effect on lives all over the world. It is exciting to think that our brands -- MTV, Nickelodeon, VHl, CBS, Simon & Shuster, Paramount Pictures, Showtime, Blockbuster, Comedy Central, Nick at Night, TV Land -- have far reaching social as well as business dimensions.

But, Redstone assures his readers: "I never had the slightest intention of attempting to influence the programming on MTV . . .. Like a trusting parent I essentially gave MTV the keys to the car." There was only one instance in the book in which Redstone indicates a personal involvement with programming. That was when he, an enthusiast for the singers of the Big Band era, asked that Tony Bennett be given a guest appearance on MTV to resuscitate his career. Other than that, his influence on MTV was, every year, as he puts it, to "set the bar higher" for MTV's financial returns.

Finally, in 1999, Mr. Redstone acquires CBS. "What a company we have!", he exults. "I am proud to say that we at Viacom are purveyers of ideas and ideals that, once established early, will last a lifetime." I have a nine year old granddaughter who is very much impressed with what she sees on MTV, and she will be lucky indeed if the "ideas and ideals" she gathers from it do not last more than the next several years -- but she is very vulnerable during those several years. The only part of the book where Sumner Redstone exhibits a direct personal satisfaction with doing good, is in the teaching of law at Brandeis, Boston University and Harvard Law Schools. That he refers to as "one of the greatest pleasures of my life."

He makes only one mistep. He writes: "All of us at Viacom are not Saints -- far from it -- but I am surrounded by people who believe they have an obligation beyond the bottom line..." Why does a throwaway remark that his people are not Saints remind me of a typical pro football coach's exculpatory remarks about a brutal performance by his team?

What is the output of these people who are "not Saints"?

Well, there is the World Wrestling Foundation Smackdown! It airs at 8 p.m. and reaches around a million and a half children ages 2-11 and another one and a half million teens under 18. It is the most violent program on television, even when you delete wrestling moves and punches, and count only beatings with objects, blows to the groin, or worse. As for foul language there are almost 27 cursing episodes per hour.

There is Howard Stern, now, I believe, mercifully removed from the air, but by common consent the foulest mouth in the history of the broadcast media. There is South Park, which presented its child viewers last year with a half hour program using the word "shit" 162 times. I suppose the creative people behind that program were trying to demonstrate that they were proud, and not at all ashamed, to do what they do.

There is the radio team of Opie and Anthony on Infinity Broadcasting. Carried in over 60 markets, Opie and Anthony broadcast songs such as "Baby Raper" while encouraging stepfathers to call in to describe their fantasies about their teenage stepdaughters.

The already mentioned MTV, the top rated cable network among those aged 12 to 24, incorporates sketch-comedy series like the Andy Dick Show, specializing in defecation and masturbation scenes, Undressed, which a Washington Post critic called " the closest thing to soft core porn this side of an X rating", Jackass, which specializes in high risk stunts and grossness, and Deathrnatch, in which animated clay figures of celebrities dismember and kill one another.

And then there is UPN, with a show like Gary and Mike, in which the use of a phrase like "fuck off, asshole" is frequent.

A family newspaper or magazine does not reprint such words in full, nor does a respectable news broadcast. But your grandchildren, my grandchildren, and Mr. Redstone's grandchildren, and millions of others, hear these words and the gross sequences in which they are embedded, so why should we not hear them also?

The examples I have referred to, which suggest that the "V" in "Viacom" often means "vile", are doubtless not program offerings in which Mr. Redstone was personally involved. As we've seen he didn't think it was his job to interfere with his so-called creative people just to give them higher fmancial targets. That said, I take some comfort in the fact that the grossest items in Viacom's output are not on CBS, though, of course, it is up to CBS to try to compete with them.

The truth is that most of us are unacquainted with what goes on these days on television or cable. Because our tastes are not in that direction, and because so much of programming that is truly gross is targeted for children and adolescents, age groups which are no longer parts of our immediate households, we are not closely acquainted with the entertainment which daily visits most people. "In this way", wrote one student of this phenomenon, "it is possible to live in a sort of clever man's paradise, without any real notion of the force of the assault outside." And I don't, and you don't either, have any real notion of that assault.

But I would like to recall to you another type of media mogul, William S. Paley. Mr. Paley, like Mr. Redstone, was interested in money. He was also interested in "winning". He was probably not nearly as bright as Mr. Redstone, in the terms in which brightness is usually measured. Mr. Paley would not, like Sumner Redstone, have achieved the all time grade point average at the Boston Latin School, or fmished Harvard in two and a haIf years while acquiring Japanese, French and German, or assisted during the war in breaking the Japanese Code. Mr. Paley could be genial and channing, but also tyrannical and cold. But, while Mr. Redstone had a passion to win -- and by that he meant to win negotiations and acquire companies -- Mr. Paley had a passion for programming. He wanted to be involved in it even when he was a very old man. It was fun. It was exciting. It was something to be proud of.

Listen to our former colleague, the late Michael Burke, talking about Mr. Paley, as quoted from an interview in Lewis Paper's book, Empire, subtitled William S. Paley and the Making of CBS:

"One took enormous pride from the fact that you worked for an outfit that was top class in its field. The world championship team. And he made that possible. Of course he had Stanton and all those others who made it work. But he established the climate. He had a passion for excellence. And it wasn't just his concern for quality. It was the sweep of his interests. From the Picassos he hung in his office to the kind of building that would house CBS, to news, to programming. The passion for quality is the one phrase that captures the essence of the man."

Well, so much for media moguls, then and now. Let me close by referring to 9/11. About a week or two after September 11 th, The New Yorker carried a piece about recent violent motion pictures, focusing on a number of movies which involved the destruction and fall of skyscrapers. The point of the piece seemed to be to show how closely life, in the form of what happened on September 11, imitated art -- that is, what happens on the screens of darkened movie theatres all the time.

But how real is the comparison? In the movies one did not see people on the streets turning to look at the catastrophe, tears running down their cheeks. One did not hear some of them murmering prayers for the dead or quietly murmering the the 23rd Psalm -- "I shall fear no evil, for Thou art with me". Police and Firemen were not heros, they were hardly present, nor was care for the dead or dying a significant part of the presentation. There was no suggestion that people from miles i away, let alone from distant states, were coming to render aid and comfort to the survivors. Rather the movies turned soon from destruction to the continuing derring do of the hero, for whom the destruction of buildings and the people in them was merely an incident in his pursuit of the plot line.

About 50 or 60 years ago there was another New Yorker piece, a famous cartoon by Charles Addams. The perspective was from the stage of a darkened movie theatre, looking straight down at the audience. The movie is evidently very emotional, very sad, for the members of the audience are in various stages of emotional distress -- stricken faces, tears streaming down cheeks. That is to say, all of the members of the audience except one. That one person is grinning from ear to ear. The cartoon worked because in that era the monstrous seemed so unlikely as to be funny.

Today, the movies featuring widescale destruction, aided by the marvelous special effects available to today's moviemakers, do not produce unhappy emotional reactions in their audiences. Indeed, many in the audience are excited, pleased, carried away by the violent action; they love it. They are like that audience of adolescents in an Oakland, California showing of Schindler's List several years ago which laughed out loud when the Commander of the concentration camp picked up a rifle and for no reason but sadistic pleasure, casually shot a woman prisoner in the yard beneath him. Charles Addams' single little man had multiplied.

I do not want to close on that note. For my part, I do believe that September 11th has changed the world. In Osama Bin Laden we are being attacked by an enemy who, whatever else he invents as the reason for his actions, hates us primarily because of our political culture, because it is secular, and even more because of our popular culture, which in large part is licentious and hedonistic and reaches almost the entire world. He has no idea of our strengths, no idea of what the biographies of our fallen would tell him, no idea of the courage and tenderness and sense of community that enveloped not only the soon to be doomed but the general population on 9/11. I'm not sure our media, before 9/11, sufficiently reflected those aspects of American life. To triumph over terror we shall have to put forward our best, and not just that of our armed forces.. A part of the war on terrorism might be for people involved with entertainment -- even entertainment moguls -- to see that it again accords with the best impulses and inspirations of the American people, not that it be puritanical, but that it reflect Americans as they really are, and that it be, in the largest sense, humane.