The absurdity to which the public discourse has degenerated in the United States could not be better illustrated than by the debate over whether to air a PBS documentary that includes foul language used by soldiers in Iraq.

The documentary, "A Company of Soldiers," will be broadcast tonight as part of the consistently outstanding "Frontline" series.

Unfortunately, much of America will see only a "clean" version of the program in which 13 expletives spoken by soldiers in combat are edited out. Amazingly, PBS executives decided to send the "clean" version to the network's 170 stations while offering the station managers the option of obtaining the so-called "raw" version.

The editing of the program is an absurd act of deference to the yahoo crowd, which increasingly is setting standards in this country. PBS executives are so shaken up by the current wave of censorship that they are unwilling to challenge it. Indeed, they are encouraging it by requiring affiliates that broadcast the historically and journalistically accurate version of the documentary to sign waivers acknowledging that the local stations are responsible for any Federal Communications Commission fines that might be levied for the airing of "illegal" words.

But it is silly to suggest that the FCC would challenge the language in this documentary - indeed, if the FCC were to do so, it would become the object of scorn and ridicule that it would so richly deserve to be.

This very serious documentary, which will air on most stations after 9 p.m., is not going to attract a large audience of children - who apparently need to be "protected" from televised language they hear every day on the schoolyard and, frequently, at home.

Even if young people did stumble onto the program, it is doubtful that they would be traumatized by words. The use of foul language in the documentary is not gratuitous. Soldiers are simply shown venting their frustrations in extreme ways during the course of extreme - and sometimes deadly - events.

"I watched the program with the flagged comments, and I think that they were totally in context," says Randy Brinson, general manager for the PBS affiliate in Seattle, which made the right decision to air the "raw" version of the documentary. "They are journalistically appropriate, they underscore the story, and our decision is to go with the program as originally produced."

In addition to the Seattle station, the PBS affiliate in Boston decided to air the realistic version. But it appears that most PBS stations will air the sanitized version.

The affiliates that broadcast a soft-focus picture of the war in Iraq are not serving their viewers. Indeed, they are deliberately deceiving them.

But the real problem is with PBS. Instead of standing up to the FCC's reign of error - in the full knowledge that the troubled agency would back off - PBS played into it by censoring its own documentary.

© 2005 Capital Times

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