"Mom and Dad ought to be able to buy a family car from General Motors without having their money go to the owners of an X-rated video service."
DETROIT -- A Michigan pro-family group Tuesday urged General Motors Corporation to divest its ownership of a satellite video company that markets $200 million annually in pornographic videos, following a published report Saturday from Rome that GM subsidiary DirecTV sells more graphic sex films each year than the pornography empire of Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt.
The American Family Association of Michigan, in a letter e-mailed Tuesday Monday to GM corporate headquarters, told CEO John F. Smith, Jr., "It is an embarassment to Michigan that our state's premiere corporation is being reported worldwide to be a bigger porn peddler than Larry Flynt. Given the direct causal relationship established by law enforcement professionals between the use of pornography and sex crimes against women and children, GM's ownership of one of the nation's largest distributors of hardcore pornographic films is a grossly irresponsible violation of your alleged 'commitment to good corporate citizenship.'"
( [LINK] )
"Mom and Dad ought to be able to buy a family car from General Motors without having their money go to the owners of an X-rated video service," Glenn wrote. "On behalf of women and children who are victims of pornography, and the hundreds of thousands of Michigan families who work for, own stock in, or drive a product made by GM, we urge you to get the world's largest corporation out of one of the world's most destructive industries."
"Please stop peddling the poison of pornography for the sake of a buck. We urge you to divest GM of its ownership of DirecTV, or instruct that GM subsidiary to end the sale of pornographic material," he wrote.
Glenn cited a Dec. 16th news analysis published by Zenit -- an international news agency offering "the world seen from Rome" -- which reported as follows:
"According to Forrester Research and the Securities and Exchange Commission, the business of selling sexually explicit images has become a $10 billion annual industry in the United States. Among the firms involved is General Motors Corp., the largest U.S. company. General Motors sells more graphic sex films every year than does Larry Flynt, owner of the Hustler empire. The (New York) Times said (Oct. 23rd) that 8.7 million Americans subscribe to DirecTV, a General Motors subsidiary, and that they spend nearly $200 million a year in pay-per-view sex films from satellite."
(See full story below.)
Glenn said AFA-Michigan is researching the means by which owners of GM stock can pursue a stockholder proposal or resolution that -- if approved during an annual stockholders meeting -- could force the corporation to divest itself of ownership in DirecTV or order the subsidiary to drop adult video sales. Zenit reported that a group of mutual fund investors is already bringing such pressure to bear on AT&T, another major mainstream corporation that now offers an X-rated channel to its digital cable television subscribers.
According to Zenit, its "mission is to provide objective and professional coverage of events, documents and issues emanating from or concerning the Catholic Church for a worldwide audience, especially the media."
The American Family Association of Michigan is a non-denominational public interest group that promotes traditional Judeo-Christian family values and educates the public about government and private sector issues that involve or threaten such values.
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To see the Zenit news analysis online, go to www.zenit.org, scroll down to "Weekly News Analysis - December 16, 2000, and click on "Pornography Joins the Mainstream Media." Full copy follows:
ZENIT, December 16, 2000 - WEEKLY NEWS ANALYSIS - The World Seen From Rome
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PORNOGRAPHY LEAVES THE BACK STREETS
Mainstream Media Companies Now Peddle Explicit Material
NEW YORK, DEC. 16, 2000 (ZENIT.org) - Pornography is no longer a back-street activity. Increasingly, big media companies are pushing sexually explicit programs as part of their normal commercial activities.
Network television broadcasts as early as 8 p.m. on weeknights are now full of programs that are surprisingly blatant in their references to sex, The New York Times reported Dec. 10. It cited the show "Boston Public," where very questionable content is displayed, even among school-age actors.
Things have changed a lot in recent years, the Times noted. While only a few years ago "The Simpsons" was criticized for its vulgarity, the new programs go far beyond previous limits for family-time entertainment. "The show's sexual candor is startling in a show aimed directly at teen-agers," the newspaper said of "Boston Public."
Another program, NBC's "Titans," also offered overt sexuality at the 8 p.m. time slot. (The show was recently canceled, but not because of protests over its lack of morality.)
The Time article mentioned that in the mid-1970s, under pressure from the Federal Communications Commission and Congress, the networks agreed to designate 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. for programs that were considered appropriate for all ages. Even if a court eventually ruled that the FCC had improperly coerced the networks, relative caution continued to prevail with early evening programming for a few years.
With the expansion of cable TV in later years, however, Fox and Warner Bros. ignored these limits, and, in 1994, Fox moved "Melrose Place" from 9 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Changes in technology
In an Oct. 23 article, The New York Times noted how technological advances have led Wall Street companies into the pornography business. According to Forrester Research and the Securities and Exchange Commission, the business
of selling sexually explicit images has become a $10 billion annual industry in the United States.
Among the firms involved is General Motors Corp., the largest U.S. company. General Motors sells more graphic sex films every year than does Larry Flynt, owner of the Hustler empire. The Times said that 8.7 million Americans subscribe to DirecTV, a General Motors subsidiary, and that they spend nearly $200 million a year in pay-per-view sex films from satellite.
Another industry leader is EchoStar Communications Corp., the No. 2 satellite provider, whose chief financial backers include Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. This company makes more money selling graphic adult films through its satellite subsidiary than Playboy does with its magazine, cable and Internet businesses combined.
AT&T Corp., the nation's biggest communications business, offers a hard-core sex channel called the Hot Network to subscribers of its broadband cable service. It also owns a company that sells sex videos to nearly a million hotel rooms.
In the United States, just under 1.5 million hotel rooms, or about 40% of all rooms, are equipped with television boxes that sell the kind of films that used to be seen mostly in adults-only theaters. Based on estimates provided by the hotel industry, at least half of all guests buy these adult movies, which means that pay-per-view sex from television hotel rooms may generate about $190 million a year in sales.
The two companies that provide hotels with pornographic films are both traded on Wall Street. The leader, On Command, based in Denver, Colorado, is worth more than $400 million, and its principal owner is Liberty Media,
controlled by John C. Malone, the cable and telecommunications magnate who sits on the board of AT&T and recently agreed to buy up to 15% of the shares of Murdoch's News Corp.
At home, Americans buy or rent more than $4 billion a year worth of graphic sex videos from retail outlets and spend an additional $800 million on less explicit sexual films. On the Internet, meanwhile, sex is one of the few things that prompt large numbers of people to disclose their credit card numbers. According to two Web ratings services, about one in four regular Internet users, or 21 million Americans, visits one of the more than 60,000 sex sites on the Web at least once a month -- more people than go to sports or government sites.
The spreading of pornography through the Internet is of particular concern, given the almost complete lack of control over both content and the ability of anyone to access the material. According to a Dec. 2 report in the Globe and Mail newspaper of Toronto, over the past three years alone, the number of North Americans with Internet access has nearly tripled to more than 77.4 million. Nearly a third of these users are pornographic-site regulars.
The Globe and Mail noted that this boom "raises the specter of a cultural crisis." The Web is bringing pornography out of the back alley and off the hidden top rack of the magazine shelf, putting it in the hands of anyone who can get on the Internet.
There has led to a vast increase in the number of people addicted to X-rated material. An estimated 5.5 million North Americans spend more than 11 hours a week on pornographic sites, which is defined as addiction.
Shareholders' objections
When AT&T announced that it would start offering the hard-core Hot Network to its 2.2 million digital-cable subscribers beginning in August, they were castigated by critics and pressured by religious and civic groups that hold stock in the company.
A group of mutual-fund investors, which included the Sisters of Charity of New York, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America and the Mennonite Church, told AT&T its members did not want their 3 million shares invested in a company that sold pornography, The New York Times reported.
"At the heart of our concern is the concept of mainstream companies getting into hard-core pornography," said Mark Regier, who manages a mutual fund for 800,000 members of the Mennonite faith. "For a company with AT&T's
tradition and its charitable work to be involved with pornography at this level is unbelievable. And I don't think many people understand what it means to take away the barriers to this kind of material, such as AT&T is doing."
Not all the media concerns have embraced the pornography business.
Adelphia, the largest cable provider in the Los Angeles area, has dropped exclusively pornographic programming from its lineup this fall, the National Catholic Register reported Dec. 3.
Adelphia is America's sixth-largest cable provider, with 5.6 million subscribers. It has a no-pornography policy. When it buys a company that carries pornographic channels it quietly drops these channels and offers alternative programs. While this policy has gone unremarked in many cities, in Los Angeles the move attracted attention.
In a front-page story Nov. 4, the Los Angeles Times reported that the programming change by Adelphia has angered the cable executives of other companies, and it characterized the decision as "risky." However, Robert W. Peters, president of Morality in Media in New York, applauded Adelphia's policy, saying that they "deserve a congressional medal."
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ZENIT is an International News Agency.
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