{"id":62768,"date":"2025-10-09T03:57:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-09T03:57:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/62768\/"},"modified":"2025-10-09T03:57:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T03:57:07","slug":"the-sworn-nipple-fighters-of-the-parents-television-council-filed-for-bankruptcy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/62768\/","title":{"rendered":"The sworn nipple-fighters of the Parents Television Council filed for bankruptcy"},"content":{"rendered":"

The human nipple has outlasted another of its staunchest foes today, as\u00a0SFGate\u00a0reports<\/a> that the Parents Television and Media Council, a \u201cwatchdog\u201d group that was once on the cutting edge of asking \u201cWon\u2019t someone think of the children?\u201d has now filed for bankruptcy. Indeed, the PTMC has fallen a long way from the halcyon days of 2004, when the group\u2014having yet to modernize by adding this newfangled \u201cmedia\u201d to its name\u2014claimed to have been one of the single biggest drivers of people complaining to the FCC about Janet Jackson\u2019s breast being (mostly) exposed for (nearly) one entire second to Super Bowl viewers, an incident it straight-facedly called<\/a> \u201can insult to every parent, every woman, and every child in America.\u201d<\/p>\n

Founded in 1995, the PTMC was the brainchild of L. Brent Bozell III, also founder of the still-running Media Research Center, a group that pushes narratives about left-wing bias in the media. (Would it shock you to know he\u2019s currently Donald Trump\u2019s nominee to be the American ambassador to South Africa?) Backed with the star power of an advisory board absolutely stacked with your great-grandparents\u2019 least problematic faves, the PTMC spend thirty years complaining about any American TV that even remotely smacked of being sexually explicit or otherwise inappropriate by their standards. (Looking at you, Spin City.) They complained that TV rating guidelines weren\u2019t strict enough. They went aggressively after guys like Seth MacFarlane, who once called getting letters from them like \u201cgetting hate mail from Hitler.\u201d (Although MacFarlane later softened on the group<\/a>, even conceding they might have a point about the number of jokes Family Guy\u00a0deployed around sexual assault.) The PTMC even managed to modernize just\u00a0enough to complain about YouTube\u2014whose own prominence was famously also an unintended consequence of \u201cNipplegate\u201d\u2014and its willingness to run uncensored versions of Saturday Night Live\u2018s \u201cDick In The Box.\u201d (Wait, can you write a whole history of American censorship at the turn of the century by charting viral Justin Timberlake moments? Someone should look into that.)<\/p>\n

But the group lost its luster in the 2010s and beyond: Accusations of financial impropriety began circulating<\/a>, and the organization was forced to subsist on such baby food outrage as getting mad at a TV show that had\u00a0already\u00a0self-censored itself as $hi! My Dad Says. The outrage surrounding Netflix film\u00a0<\/a>Cuties\u00a0gave the group one last spasm of anger to coast off of, but, according to\u00a0SFGate, they finally threw in the towel and declared bankruptcy on October 3. The group\u2019s final missive<\/a>, penned back in early September, suggests that even broken clocks that are\u00a0really\u00a0fixated on kids hearing swears can be in the right every once in a while, calling on Congress to do more to regulate tech companies who are peddling artificial intelligence chatbots to children.<\/p>\n

Parents Television Council sees the words Sex Box, begins drafting email<\/a>Parents Television Council would like butts to be served a la carte, please<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The human nipple has outlasted another of its staunchest foes today, as\u00a0SFGate\u00a0reports that the Parents Television and Media…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":62769,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-62768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62768\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}