Network censors, who have increasingly allowed sexual references and cuss words to be included in their programs despite their offensiveness to conservative religious and family groups, are displaying a vigilance rarely seen in recent years to purge programs of any dialogue that could touch sensitive nerves following the Sept. 11 attack, several publication are noting.
Friday’s Wall Street Journal cites deleted dialogue in the new Ellen DeGeneres show in which Ellen tells her mother that her online business has “collapsed.” To which the mother replies: “Oh, well thank your lucky stars you weren’t there at the time.” Asked about the deletion, Martin Franks, head of CBS’s standards and practices department, remarked: “We don’t want to be callous or jarring under these extraordinary circumstances.”
Nevertheless, Alan Wurtzel, Franks’ counterpart at NBC, acknowledged, “Sometimes things get taken too far.”
