"Indecency"

Frank Rich in The Great Indecency Hoax:

"Desperate Housewives" is hardly a blue-state phenomenon. A hit everywhere, it is even a bigger hit in Oklahoma City than it is in Los Angeles, bigger in Kansas City than it is in New York. All those public moralists who wail about all the kids watching Ms. Sheridan on "Monday Night Football" would probably have apoplexy if they actually watched what Ms. Sheridan was up to in her own series - and then looked closely at its Nielsen numbers. Though children ages 2 to 11 make up a small percentage of the audience of either show, there are actually more in that age group tuning into Mr. Cherry"s marital brawls (870,000) than into the N.F.L."s fisticuffs (540,000). "Desperate Housewives" also ranks No. 5 among all prime-time shows for ages 12-17. ("Monday Night Football" is No. 18.) This may explain in part why its current advertisers include products like Fisher-Price toys, the DVD of "Elf" and the forthcoming Tim Allen holiday vehicle, "Christmas With the Kranks."

In When a TV Talking Head Becomes a Talking Body David Carr wrote:

Last week, a Cleveland news anchor, Sharon Reed, was caught on camera stripping nude and joining a gaggle of other people in the altogether. A year ago, an anchor at another Ohio station, Catherine Bosley of WKBN in Youngstown, resigned after participating partly nude in a wet T-shirt contest that ended up on the Web.

But Ms. Reed need not fear for her job. The cameras that caught her shimmying out of her bra for a nude photography installation belonged to her employer - WOIO-TV, a CBS affiliate - which rode her first-person account of a photo shoot of public nudity to a ratings triumph...

Ms. Reed, who has a master's degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, lauded her own bravery as she removed her bra in front of the cameras, suggesting that there was significance in her willingness to strip naked for the sake of art: she was taking part in an installation by Spencer Tunick, an artist who photographs choreographed scenes of public nudity. She then took off the rest of her clothes, and the camera filmed her as she walked away from it and joined a group of participants in the photo shoot, also naked.

[Bill Applegate, her station's general manager] defended Ms. Reed's first-person account as a legitimate approach to a report about Mr. Tunick and the installation he did in Cleveland.

Except that the event took place last June, and the station held the report until the November sweeps month...

Mr. Tunick, who cooperated with Ms. Reed on the report, was unhappy with it, saying that his nonsexual approach to photographing hundreds of nude people in public places - in this case, an installation sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland - had been hijacked to achieve big numbers for a local news broadcast...

...in a business where almost anything that produces big ratings seems to merit attention - how many reports do viewers really need to see about restaurant kitchens where rats frolic and cockroaches dine? - it is possible that however tasteless, the naked anchor represents one more skirmish in the battle to grab a dwindling number of news viewers.

So what's the big deal?

Update
I should have said, let the people watch what they want to. More here.