PTC Study Charts Increase in TV Profanity

The Parents Television Council reports that a new analysis of TV programming shows that profanity during primetime broadcast television not only has increased since 1998, but that harsher profanity has quickly risen in prominence and pervasiveness. More than a quarter of the expletives a child will hear on TV today will be the exact words or some form of [three unholy words] that air unbleeped or partially-bleeped on broadcast television, the watchdog group claims. PTC President Tim Winter said, "Our research is shocking and especially troubling to parents. Not only are harsher profanities like the f-word and s-word airing during hours when children are likely to be in the viewing audience, but they are airing with greater frequency. There is certainly no 'chilling' effect on broadcast television as the networks like to claim. The opposite has occurred: broadcast standards have become so permissive that the term is now an oxymoron."