Unfit for Viewing

In his column “Sex Sells: Sound Familiar?� (Sept. 19), Brian Lowry posed the question: “When was the last time you saw an ad you deemed ‘personally offensive’ or ‘morally objectionable’?�

My unequivocal answer: While taping the Olympic USA-China women’s soccer match for my 5-and 7-year-old granddaughters. NBC saw fit to run a Nike ad featuring a masked man wielding a chain saw while relentlessly chasing a screaming woman for more than 30 seconds. How many parents thought watching a soccer match--in the Olympics no less--on a Sunday morning might be informative or at the very least harmless for their children?

What scares me as much as my little ones seeing this revolting piece is that no one involved in its inception, creation or scheduling had the decency, let alone common sense, to stop it.

TERI CIRANNA

Irvine

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I appreciate and commend Lowry for his incisive analysis of what actually goes on in the entertainment industry, but I fear he is swimming upstream. I am not charmed by watching someone point a gun at another human being and calling it “entertainment.� I am not entertained by car crashes, explosions, bombings, sex scenes of any sort unless with a coherent point in the story line. And so on and on and on.

I just want to urge Lowry to keep the heat on. Our entertainment industry, in large measure, is a cesspool.

DAVID H. WALLACE

Newport Beach