Word: wildmon
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...Coalition for Better Television (CBTV), which claims to represent 400 conservative organizations, including the Rev. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, has been threatening to attack network TV's Achilles' heel by a consumer boycott of its skittish sponsors. The head of CBTV is the Rev. Donald Wildmon, a Methodist preacher from Mississippi, who for the past four years has been monitoring TV as founder of one of the coalition's member groups, the National Federation for Decency. Relying on a new list of TV's most and least "constructive" shows, put together from a survey...
...important, advertisers are uneasy. Chairman Owen Butler of Procter & Gamble, TV's biggest customer ($486.3 million in commercials last year), announced in mid-June that within the past year his company had pulled out of 50 TV movies and series episodes, including seven of the ten series that Wildmon has cited as "top sex-oriented."* Last week representatives of at least four companies-including Warner-Lambert, SmithKline, Gillette and Phillips Petroleum-conferred privately with CBTV, some in apparent hope that Wildmon would excuse them from the boycott hit list if they would go and sin no more. Wildmon...
Such remarks may cause Wildman's opponents almost to choke with anger. "Wildmon is like Hitler with his hit list," says Lee Rich, president of Lorimar, the company that produces such likely targets as Dallas, Flamingo Road and Knots Landing. "No one should tell the American public what to watch or what to do. Who is Wildmon to say he is the judge? When does it stop?" Joel Segal, a senior vice president of Manhattan's Ted Bates ad agency, was aroused enough to fault giant P & G for giving "credence and support to a bunch of radicals...
...them by Nielsen, which measures the size of the audience. Advertisers are not likely to stop buying commercials on Dallas. lusty as it is, so long as it remains on top. When it begins to falter in the ratings, sponsors may discover scruples and look for another series. Wildmon's coalition will probably have no influence at all on the top shows, but it may be able to claim credit for killing those series that were already ailing...
Indeed, the coalition may be able to announce a victory that was already won. The "jiggle shows," which it finds among the most offensive, seem to be on the way out anyway, and the new season will emphasize action and adventure. Angry as they are, network executives probably heard Wildmon's message even before he broadcast it. "There is a general drawing back of viewer tastes from the cutting edge of the last three years," says ABC Vice President Alfred Schneider. "We are hearing that there has been a general 'too farness' in the sexuality presented...