Aiming to rid broadcast television from "morally offensive" content, CleanTV America has opened for business and plans to launch its full functionality March 1, not to mention an e-mail campaign pressuring local and national advertisers to quit buying time on shows that CleanTV users deem offensive.
The site's plan is to identify what it thinks is morally offensive and then let users simultaneously e-mail protests to both the stations showing the content and their advertisers. The site plans to enlist volunteers to monitor programming and describe anything objectionable in reports to be posted on the site.
Church of Latter Day Saints activist Steven DeVore is the mastermind of the site and the strategy. DeVore said he was finally pushed to act after he, like many others, was offended by the halftime show during CBS's Super Bowl telecast earlier this month.
"I have become increasingly alarmed with the rapid moral degradation and baseness of network television programming," DeVore wrote in Meridian, a Mormon Church online magazine. "How bad network television really is was brought home to me and my family… as we watched the Super Bowl on CBS television." He wrote that it wasn't just the Janet Jackson/Justin Timberlake incident but a combination of "base juvenile humor" and several advertising spots involving male impotence and other sexual references.
Yet DeVore also said that the Super Bowl was the least of it. "The Super Bowl, compared to the rest of network television’s program offerings, is mild when it comes to offensive programming," he wrote. "The networks broadcast on a daily basis soap operas that model and glamorize pre-marital sex, adultery, and homosexuality. Prime-time programs are even worse. And late night programming is disgusting."
DeVore told the Deseret Morning News he decided to take up the cause after Mormon Elder M. Russell Ballard challenged church members to "stand up and say enough is enough," and after Ballard and other church leaders suggested a mass e-mail campaign might be a way to do it.
DeVore believes targeting the local stations and advertisers might be even more effective than targeting just the source television networks and the Federal Communications Commission.
CleanTV's e-mail program will let users pick the station, network, and local and national advertisers' names and send them personalized e-mails simultaneously, identifying for the recipients the show in question, the specific material the user found offensive, and asking to stop presenting or supporting that kind of material – or, the users would simply quit buying a company's products or services until they do withdraw from such shows.
DeVore has promised to organize picketing at any television stations and advertisers who don't respond to the e-mail campaign, and he hopes it picks up nationwide, especially since CleanTV will be recruiting volunteer monitors from around the country.
DeVore acknowledged, however, that it isn't necessarily an LDS church-sanctioned project. Church leaders, he told the News, are "aware of it. I can't say they support it or don't. I just know they are aware of it."
