MTV and Censorship
MTV, founded in 1981, was the first all-music video network, initially targeting a young, predominantly white audience. The network faced significant criticism for its early exclusion of African American artists from its programming, only including them after external pressure from record labels, notably featuring Michael Jackson, who became a defining figure of the MTV era. Over time, MTV attempted to diversify its content, introducing segments like "Yo! MTV Raps," which highlighted rap music but also sometimes segregated it from the mainstream. Censorship has been a recurring issue for MTV, with the network often blurring or bleeping objectionable content in music videos, ranging from explicit lyrics to images deemed inappropriate, such as instances involving Madonna and Pearl Jam. While the platform has evolved to include various genres and content beyond music videos, it often navigates a complex relationship with artists and corporate interests, leading to self-censorship in many cases. Critics have pointed out that MTV’s policies reflect broader trends in media to avoid controversial topics to appease advertisers. The interplay of race, music, and censorship within MTV’s history reveals the challenges of representation and freedom of expression in a commercial landscape.
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Subject Terms
MTV and Censorship
Founded: August 1, 1981
Type of organization: American cable television network specializing in rock music videos aimed at a young audience
Significance: MTV censors have occasionally banned videos, but more often they have simply run disclaimers or resorted to bleeping or blurring objectionable content
Robert Pittman founded MTV in 1981 as the world’s first all-music video network, gearing its programming primarily at a white suburban audience aged fifteen through twenty-five. The fledgling company refused to show videos by African American artists until Columbia Records threatened to boycott the network if it did not air Michael Jackson’s videos. With popular music videos such as “Beat It” and “Thriller,” Jackson quickly became the superstar of the new medium. However, only a few other black artists—such as Prince and Whitney Houston—managed to break into MTV’s broadcast rotation.
Bending to recording industry pressure and audience demand, MTV eventually created a rap-music segment entitled Yo! MTV Raps, which premiered on August 6, 1988. The segment segregated rap from the rest of MTV’s play list, but it quickly became one of the network’s most popular shows. Critics renewed charges of racial censorship when the network launched MTV Unplugged, a series of live acoustic concerts featuring occasional black artists, in 1989.
Individual cable companies have occasionally dropped MTV from their service. A Texas-based company, for example, stopped carrying the network during the summer of 1991 in response to audience protests. More often, however, censorship of MTV has been conducted within the video industry itself. The high cost of production, often underwritten by music companies, usually imposes a form of self-censorship on video artists. Nevertheless, some artists who are successful enough to underwrite their own production expenses have been able to produce videos that MTV censors have suppressed.
MTV censors initially refused to approve Neil Young’s song “This Note’s for You,” alleging that it endorsed a product, but they subsequently rescinded the order. Young’s work received MTV’s award for best video of 1989. In each of the six following years a video originally censored won this award.
MTV has also censored videos for indecency, or for glamorizing drug use or violence. In perhaps the most notable example, it banned the December 1, 1990, debut of the sexually explicit “Justify My Love” by Madonna. In 1993 it demanded that the violent ending of Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” be cut. MTV’s symbiotic relationship with artists and the music industry makes such bans relatively rare, however. The network has typically relied on bleeping out objectionable words or blurring objectionable images. For example, MTV censors bleeped the line “I wanna f—— you like an animal” in Nine Inch Nails’ song “Closer” in 1995. The year before, it blurred images of water pistols in the “Hip Hop Hooray” video of Naughty by Nature. In a number of videos, particularly by rappers, censors have blurred commercial product logos from artists’ shoes, shirts, and hats—often at the instigation of the companies themselves, when they have not wanted their products to be associated with rap music.
As the network has grown, it has abandoned its all-music format to include cartoons, situation comedies, documentaries, and even news programs.
An October, 1993, episode of MTV’s cartoon program Beavis and Butt-head featured the title characters setting fire to household objects. A five year-old viewer in Dayton, Ohio, followed suit, starting a blaze that killed his two-year-old sister. In response, the network afterward began running disclaimers before episodes of the program. A few years later the network’s documentary-soap opera titled The Real World showed a male cast member dragging a female housemate out of bed. Considering this scene a bit too real, MTV censors insisted that the female’s bare chest be blurred.
In 2008 Weird Al Yankovic alleged that in 2006 MTV asked him to bleep-out the names of the online file-sharing sites Grokster, Kazaa, Limewire, and Morpheus from his video for “Don’t Download This Song, ” or the network would not air the video. Although Yankovic complied, he reportedly decided to bleep the names out “as obnoxiously as possible” in order to draw attention to the fact that his lyrics were censored.
According to Hannibal Travis in 2011, MTV was one of several broadcast companies that followed a comprehensive policy of avoiding political, social, and economic controversies in its programming and advertising. Travis argued that the broadcasters, which also included ABC, CBS, Fox Broadcasting, NBC, and CNN, implemented such policies in order to remain inoffensive and therefore attractive to the advertisers, from whom the companies derive their profits.
Bibliography
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