A local TV station in DC is running a series on breast exams, featuring uncensored breasts this week. The station is going out of it’s way to characterize this bit of programming as daring and “ground-breaking”, as well as prominently featuring naked breasts.

I concede that breast cancer awareness and prevention is terribly important, and that providing useful information to the public on the importance of exams, both self- and professional, and how they’re conducted, is commendable. I have no issue with the report’s goals or stated purpose; in fact, it’s a welcome change from the usual alarmist crap** local news usually offers up; I wish this kind of practical health reporting (assuming this yet-to-be-aired series is practical) was the norm, rather than the exception.

Of course, all the cynical bastard in me sees is the station manager thinking “Hey, I just figured out how to get naked boobs on our channel during sweeps week! With plausible deniability for the FCC and the prudes! Our ad rates will be huge!“, then I once again become disallusioned with the televised media, and realize once again that they’d rather the story be about them than anything else. Who needs content when you have controversy (that I am, regrettably, feeding into with this post)?

While my feminist leanings yearn to and do applaud the fact that information likely to prevent breast cancer will probably be broadcast as part of this report, I honestly can’t believe that the motivation for doing so is anything but self-serving, and any incidence of actual public service content is merely an afterthought.

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* –It’s never the wrong time for an Office Space reference, only it’s the CBS affiliate in DC that’s channel 9; WJLA, the station running this piece, is channel 7)

** – Why do people even have houses, if every innocuous thing inside them can kill you? Because, of course, they’d have to go outside, where there lurk teeming masses of child predators, identity theives, and patients zero. The safest thing to do is to huddle under a Snuggie™ on the couch and bask in the comforting light of the television, where at least you can hear how shitty the world is from vapid pretty people.