A Wardrobe Malfunction and You'll Lose Your Shirt, So to Speak

Next time an aging pop star feels the urge to unfetter one of her breasts on national television, it will cost TV station owners 10 times as much.

President Bush yesterday signed legislation that allows the Federal Communications Commission to slap a broadcaster with a fine of up to $325,000 per incident for airing programming the feds deem indecent.

That's 10 times the coin the FCC had been allowed to slap station suits around with before. Bush said yesterday that the earlier top fine of $32,500 was lunch money for broadcasters.

"For some broadcasters, this amount is meaningless" were his exact words, as well as, "It's relatively painless for them when they violate decency standards."

The total bill to CBS-owned stations for the national debut of Janet Jackson's right breast during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show came to $550,000.

It would have been more had the FCC also fined CBS stations not owned by the network but that also aired the breast-baring incident. But the FCC did not, determining that the CBS-owned stations had somehow been in on the act but the CBS affiliate stations were dopes that had been duped.

More recently, however, the FCC did fine some CBS affiliates a total of $3.3 million for airing an episode of the drama series "Without a Trace" that included a scene of a simulated teen orgy.

All of the CBS affiliates fined are in Middle America, where prime time starts an hour earlier than in the rest of the country, for the sake of viewers there who have to get up early to milk the cow, feed the chickens and plow the back 40.

But -- and here's where it gets tricky -- the feds determined ages ago that it was okay for broadcasters to air naughty bits after 10 p.m., when the kiddies have all gone to bed, though they have to knock it off by 6 a.m., when the young ones get up.

So the episode of "WAT" that's okay to air in the final hour of prime time in Washington or Los Angeles is indecent in the final hour of prime time in Denver. Which begs the question: Why should the East and West coasts get to have all the fun?

The movement to increase the fines started to gain steam in early '04 when Jackson bared her breast. That Super Bowl halftime show was produced for CBS by MTV, which is pretty darn ironic because had the show run on MTV it would not have been fined; the FCC's regs regarding indecency do not apply to cable or satellite television. Just the lucky broadcasters.

"In recent years broadcast programming has too often pushed the bounds of decency," Bush said at the White House signing ceremony. "Language is becoming coarser during the times when it's more likely children will be watching television. It's a bad trend, a bad sign."

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TV-audience-tracking Nielsen Media Research woke up from its decades-long slumber this week, discovered a lot of people were watching TV outside their homes and decided it had better get cracking on measuring this highfalutin TV-watching going on in bars, in hotels, on iPods, on cellphones and on the Internet.

Nielsen has even given its newfound enthusiasm for measuring things a cute name: Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement -- A2/M2.

"A2/M2 is the result of extensive consultation with clients who told us clearly that we should 'follow the video,' " Nielsen Media Research chief exec Susan Whiting said in a statement.

The company is going to install software on computers owned by people in its sample audience to create a single group whose TV- and Web-viewing will be measured, in time for the 2007-08 TV season, Nielsen hopes.

It also plans by 2008 to begin counting viewing levels in bars, hotels, dorms, trains and other places outside the home where people watch TV.

And, Nielsen says, it's continuing to work on devices that would measure viewing on cellphones and iPods; expect a 400-person Nielsen panel of iPod users by the end of this year.