Watch Bill Cosby Tell Tipper Gore That Writing Children's TV 'is as juicy as sex'
When Bill and Hillary Clinton, Tipper Gore, Mr. Rogers and the Cos joined at the White House to lament the state of children's TV programming
Bill Cosby, as noted below, has had better days. Here's a video clip from one of them: July 29, 1996, when the then-beloved comedian joined such luminaries as Hillary Clinton, Mr. Rogers, Jack Valenti, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and President Bill Clinton at a White House summit to, um, clean up children's television.
The whole summit is worth watching (on drugs), but here's a weird snippet beginning with Tipper Gore, who literally says to the Cos "We want more of what made us love you so much," and then ending with Cosby saying, out of nowhere and with a strange look on his face, "It's as juicy as sex." I wish I was kidding:
The Clinton administration, we must never forget, was just lousy with efforts to crack down on entertainment and communications companies in the name of The Children (here's a big yet incomplete list of such activities lovingly compiled by the administration itself in preparation for the First Lady's run at the Senate). Hillary Clinton, as she bragged in a startlingly alarmist 2005 speech, "spent more than 30 years advocating for children and worrying about the impact of media." And that was a decade ago.
As I argue in my otherwise unrelated L.A. Times op-ed this morning, thank the Constitution that such illiberal exertions—in this case the Communications Decency Act, the Child Online Protection Act, the ideas within the Family Entertainment Protection Act—were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds. And that the Tipper Gore fantasies about the once-vaunted V-chip somehow being able to help "direct children" also died on the vine.
