America’s First Network TV Censor: The Work of NBC’s Stockton Helffrich. Robert Pondillo. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010. 255 pp.
A member of the media faculty at Middle Tennessee State University, Pondillo relates the story of probably the best known (though today, largely forgotten) man who was the prime gatekeeper over what could appear or be discussed on NBC’s television network during its first dozen years. From the network’s start in 1948 until 1960, Helffrich’s word was law concerning the broad acceptability of program or advertising content.
Based on Helffrich’s own extensive files, now a part of the voluminous NBC collection at the Wisconsin State Historical Society, we read here about his 1948 to 1960 period as the “continuity acceptance” official with the network. That the man kept such meticulous records (unusual for a censor) makes the present well-documented historical study of his efforts possible.
Though not discussed in this volume, Helffrich’s time at the network was followed by two decades helping to administer the broadcast industry’s Television Code Authority in New York (it was abolished just two years after he retired). In other words, Helffrich (1911-1997) spent much of his career helping to define what the establishment considered acceptable for mass television viewing, and hence defining America’s de facto TV tastes.
Pondillo, a media historian, examines five often-censored subjects—advertising; language; and depictions of sex, violence, and race—in detail, exposing the sometimes surprising complexity and nuance of early media censorship. Among the issues considered were questions of whether too many sadistic Westerns in the late 1950s might coarsen child viewers, how to talk about homosexuality without using the term, and how best to advertise toilet paper without offending viewers. So was the female form and just how much of it might be shown on the air.
But this is also a study of external factors that affected TV programming—the Cold War and related McCarthyism, the growing struggle to achieve civil rights for black Americans, and the fast-changing role of teens and their musical taste. These and other points all played a part in the operation of NBC’s continuity acceptance operation, which in turn helped define both an industry and American culture.
To say that television standards have changed in the years since Helffrich’s time is putting it mildly. Changing social mores (of at least some Americans) and rising competition from other media have served to lower the bar as to what we can and should be able to see and hear. Pondillo’s study tells us about a very different time, one that was central in the formative years of network television programming.
CHRISTOPHER H. STERLING
George Washington University