Hypocrisy, thy name is the NFL, FCC, CBS, etc.

[The Evil Genius]

Brutal.

Mark Kreidler: Wretched excess? This is a surprise?

By Mark Kreidler -- Bee Sports Columnist

Published 2:15 a.m. PST Tuesday, February 3, 2004

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Memo to the National Football League: Bacchus and Hades called. They want their intellectual property back.

Top NFL officials are upset at being used as the television platform for the first Super Peep? Fantastic! At what point did their righteous indignation kick in, before or after Kid Rock took the halftime stage to sing about gettin' hookers and goin' to methadone clinics?

Wait: Never mind. The Kid's NFL-approved, on account of the man can really sell beer.

We gather here today to discuss not Tom Brady's naked calm, but Janet Jackson's bare breast. We gather here to speak of the FCC first, the NFL second. You say you want a revolution, well, you know. Ya gotta have your pasties in a row before anything else can happen.

I kid, of course. I kid because I love - hypocrisy, that is. And when it comes to blatant hypocrisy in a patently commercial endeavor, there are few rivals to the proud men and women - whoops, men and more men - of the NFL (official motto: We won't know until we have time to break down the videotape).

Tha League complaining about Jackson's halftime international exposure in Sunday's Super Bowl - singer Justin Timberlake reached over and grabbed away part of Janet's bustier, leaving only her breast and a sun-shaped "nipple shield" showing - is sort of like you driving to the cattle ranch and then whining about the smell. You were expecting maybe roses?

This is precisely what the Super Bowl has become (the exposure-fest, not the cattle ranch, although I guess we can talk about the cow-pie angle if you wish). This is exactly the publicity-soaking, career jump-starting, grab-attention-any-way-you-can behemoth that the NFL has created. It's what the NFL has fostered and promoted and compensated and rewarded and every other word you can think of that adds up to overblown, over-the-top spectacle.

This is the Show. If there's time, they play some football, too.

Monday was National Outrage Day over Jackson's flesh-flash. Many media outlets were so outraged by the two-second skin exposure that they needed to replay the video 500 or 600 times to properly calibrate their anger. It was that kind of an emotional venting, diluted only by the occasional blurry line superimposed where the, ah, sun-shield shone.

The chief of the Federal Communications Commission, Michael Powell, used words like "classless," "crass" and "deplorable" to describe the moment.

Interestingly, Powell had no comment on the trailer for the movie "Van Helsing," which aired during the Super Bowl and contained in one remarkably violent 30-second spot more depravity than you could find in a truckload of Timberlake-Jackson moments. Hey, get the kids in here! They're about to behead one of the bad guys!

Classically, Americans didn't object to the bloody gore, but raised holy heck when Jackson dove in skin-first at the end of her performance. Which, since we're keeping score, was produced by MTV, which is owned by Viacom, which also owns CBS, which was telecasting the game. You do the math.

Network executives Monday proclaimed themselves astonished and appalled that an MTV production would have included such an offensive moment, which clearly indicates that each of these fine men is in desperate need of a raise in order to afford expanded basic cable. There, he will be able to watch Johnny Knoxville and the "Jackass" crew, and the "Real World" and, I don't know, maybe 20 of the other 24 hours that MTV programs daily.

Not that there's anything wrong with that! But, as the saying goes, you lie down with blood-sucking publicity leeches, you wake up with blood-sucking publicity leeches. In Hollywood, entertainment insiders like to use a code word for this kind of pre-planned shock: Business.

If all this makes you yearn for the good old days when the Super Bowl was free of all the bombast, let me be the first to assure you: They don't exist. The early Super Bowls may have featured only marching bands at their halftime galas. But it's hard to forget the sight of the astronaut-type guy landing in the middle of the field after jet-packing in before one of those games.

Nope, the Super Bowl has always been about massive hype and an utter celebration of that most American quality, excess. The late Pete Rozelle, during his tenure as NFL commissioner, saw to it that every succeeding title game was surrounded by more bombast than the last. Pete might never have envisioned a sun-shaped nipple shield going out to 90 million U.S. homes, but I'm not convinced he would have entirely objected.

Perhaps this was the Super Bowl that will begin to turn that tide. After all, the NFL ought to be reveling today in the aftermath of one of the great recent finishes in the game's history, and instead it is fending off questions about birds, bees and breaking television barriers. The league ought to be saluting Tom Brady and the Patriots. Instead, it's deflecting blame and trying to get the world to believe it didn't see this coming.

But it saw this coming - in deed, if not in specific detail. If you saw Shania Twain in her S&M outfit in San Diego last year, you pretty much knew there weren't many boundaries left for the Super Spectacle.

In one of those delicious ironies, the NFL last week threatened Las Vegas hoteliers with severe repercussions for stealing its "intellectual property" by charging patrons to attend parties at which the Super Bowl was shown.

Paging Commissioner Paul Tagliabue: The glitter clubs are on the line. They're wondering when you plan to return their halftime show to the Strip.

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[Funkyalligator]

I agree...violence is way more prevalent that sex and it should be the other way around..