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Final interview with comedian Steve Allen
The Summer of 2000
By Jean L. Lotus
White Dot

On "The Steve Allen Show," with Edie Adams (c. 1958/NBC).
Image Credit: MPTV.
Photographer: Gerald Smith.

”One pattern we’ve discovered, I had not anticipated, which is that some CEO’s of the major corporations which are, of course, America’s chief advertisers literally were not aware of where their company’s commercials were being placed.”

Steve Allen, the urbane author and piano-playing, bon-mot-spinning entertainer was one of the closest things America had to a "popular intellectual." Before his death on Halloween, 2000, he devoted much of his time to trying to save the medium that brought him fame and that he considered redeemable.

In full-page newspaper ads across the country, Allen called television a "moral sewer" and asked for help telling advertisers the shows they paid for are filled with "filth, vulgarity, coarse humor, premarital sex, violence and killings."

The Parents Television Council (PTC) in Los Angeles, still coordinates the ads and posts a website: www.parentstv.org. PTC monitors prime time shows for examples of sex, violence and vulgarity.

Excitingly, the site lists parent companies for products advertised on objectionable shows: If a Burger King commercial airs on a trashy show, you can send an email to the CEO of Diageo foods (corporate owners of Burger King) through the PTC website.

In 2000, a PTC campaign persuaded 31 sponsors to drop ads from "family-hour" wrestling show WWF Smackdown!, including MCI Worldcom, Ford and Procter & Gamble. Producers promised to tone down violence and profanity.

White Dot interviewed Steve Allen the summer before his death.
(More: White Dot News Source)
2002 © White Dot.

Not a new story, true, but one that remains poignant regarding the boob-tube and relations to the displayed talent many have commented on over the years. Interestingly enough -- from the article’s last paragraph -- my wife and I both enjoy 60 Minutes, neither of us can stand The West Wing all that much, she thinks Law & Order is great (I’ll tolerate it), and I think Everybody Loves Raymond is great (she’ll tolerate it).

Dan