NBC: Madonna's Concert 'Highlight' Finds the Cutting Floor
by Jody Brown
October 20, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A Mississippi-based pro-family group says three-quarters-of-a-million e-mail messages from its supporters to NBC must have gotten the message across, because the network has announced it is going to drop a controversial portion of an upcoming broadcast.Backing away from a confrontation with religious groups, NBC says it has decided not to show pictures of Madonna mounting a Crucifix when it airs her concert special next month. During her song "Live to Tell," Madonna sings from a mirrored cross wearing a crown of thorns. Some religious and conservative groups -- among them the American Family Association -- called that a blasphemous publicity stunt.
According to an Associated Press report, several religious groups told NBC they would organize a boycott of one of the concert's commercial sponsors if the cross scene appeared, and were meeting next week to decide which company to target. AFA founder and chairman Don Wildmon is a long-time proponent of that approach to getting broadcasters' attention.
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Dr. Don Wildmon |
"We appreciate the fact that NBC has seen the power of the pocketbook and decide to cancel [that] scene from the Madonna special," says Wildmon in a press release. "The network should never have even entertained using the scene, but we appreciate their removing it from the special."In an interview with AP, Wildmon laments the fact that NBC will still broadcast the special on the night before Thanksgiving. As he points out, making mockery of the crucifixion of Christ has been a trademark of Madonna for many years. "The program is going to go on as it was planned, minus the crucifixion scene," he says. "But I don't think Madonna liked it [that] they edited it out because she called it the highlight of the show."
The AFA press release points out that Madonna once said that "crucifixes are sexy because there's a naked man on them."
So what caused NBC to change their mind about airing the scene? As noted by the World Entertainment News Network, the network began to receive criticism as soon as it announced plans to broadcast the concert -- and oftentimes, protests sprang up outside the venues on Madonna's recent "Confessions" tour. But Wildmon is convinced that pro-family advocates -- many of them supporters of his organization -- played a major role in the decision.
"Seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand e-mails asking NBC not to show [the crucifixion scene] could be considered to be a little bit of pressure," he tells AP. "NBC may be dumb, but they're not stupid."
In its e-mail alerts to supporters, AFA had noted blatant inconsistencies in NBC's treatment of various faith-based groups, contending that the network decision-makers evidently have no problem bashing Christians -- but would not dare broadcast something that Muslims, for example, find sacrilegious. In fact, earlier this year NBC Nightly News chose not to show in its reports the editorial cartoons that so greatly offended many in the Muslim world for several months.
