CBS Is a Hypocrite for Airing 'Pornified Content' while Promoting 'Me Too,' Watchdog Says



A media watchdog is calling on CBS to ensure the public it never will air "pornified content" again in light of a Grammy performance of the sexually explicit song "WAP."

The broadcast was rated TV-14 and did not include any warning about the nature of the performance by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, which included women scantily dressed and dancing and gyrating on a large bed. One of the performers danced in a strip club-like setting, with cash floating around her.

Host Trevor Noah, before the performance, told the television audience, "If you have small children in the room, just tell them it's a song about giving a cat a bath."

Tim Winter, president of the Parents Television Council, said in a statement Wednesday that the "airing of such pornified content during the recent Grammy broadcast is inexcusable, especially for a television network that dumped its own senior executives over alleged #MeToo concerns."

"CBS violated the trust of millions of families and exposed potentially millions of children to the sexually-explicit performance of ‘WAP,'" Winter said. "The performance of this song never should have made it onto primetime broadcast television, and we are calling on concerned members of the public to sign our petition calling for it never to happen again."

Regardless of the age rating, he said, "there is no amount of warning that can mitigate the harm that messages like these send to impressionable teenaged boys and girls."

"Not only is it the height of hypocrisy for CBS to be propagating the message that girls are nothing more than sexual objects, it is morally and ethically bankrupt," Winter said. "Broadcasters keep pushing the boundaries of what's acceptable for the broadcast medium, but CBS has crossed a line with the recent Grammys. It is time for CBS to ensure that pornified content never makes it to air again."

Winter is not the only critic.

Nicole Clark, a former model and the director of Cover Girl Culture, also has criticized the song.

"Nothing about the lyrics are empowering for anyone. Call it freedom of speech - but it's not freeing," Clark said. "The lyrics imprison girls as sexual objects. They debase women. They rob women of their ability to be financially independent. The formula for success and happiness they preach is that what girls have to offer men is merely sex."