I place in the category of such events Law & Order actor Michael Moriarty's showdown with Attorney General Janet Reno over her threats to censor network TV if it did not significantly reduce the amount of violence that it put on the air.
Looking back it seems to me to be plausible, even probable, that Reno's kicking up a furor over TV violence was a cynical ploy by a Clinton administration implementing a thoroughly neoliberal economic program ("Reinventing Government," NAFTA, etc. as the modest social promises were kicked to the curb) that, generally unpopular with a public that had overwhelmingly voted against this path, outraged supporters who rightly felt betrayed, while winning no points from the right for its vigorous furtherance of the Reagan Revolution--and attempting to change the subject and score cheap points with an appeal to the Helen Lovejoys of the world at a time when this was still a fairly hot topic with them.
Hence the grandstanding about what was airing on TV as entertainment--and the specific decision to focus on violence on TV rather than sex on TV, sex usually the more controversial thing, and therefore more charged, not least because it was so much a concern of the culture warriors. By contrast concern for the violence on TV was a less charged matter, in part because of how concern about it could seem to cut across ideological lines, and be less suggestive of pandering to a right-wing Agenda in this way as in so many others.
Hence also the ease with which Reno backed away from her calls with nothing done about the matter--that people were less eager for something to be done about the violence on TV than the sex on TV making her and the administration less likely to catch criticism for the retreat (especially from that right that they were so anxious not to offend any more than they were already doing, little good that it ever did them).
Indeed, the only real consequence of the affair can seem to be the damage Mr. Moriarty did to his career by taking the cynically proffered bait. Thus did the fuss, which was undesired by Moriarty's producers and certainly to hear him tell it, see him stand alone, like Gary Cooper in High Noon (!)--but afterward parting ways with the show, and if he went on working afterward, never landing a really comparable gig again, no starring role in a comparably high-profile series appearing in his list of credits three decades on.
Of course, that did not mean that disputation over the perceived violence of the content on network television was wholly at an end. Still, in line with the broad politics that made Janet Reno's maneuver such a a safe one for her to undertake, and the fact that the successor administration was a Republican one with a blatant culture war commitment, sex figured in it much more highly than violence, such that when George W. Bush appointee to the Federal Communications Commission Michael Powell--like the Clinton administration, easy to see as cynically stoking the culture war as cover and a source of cheap political points as it busily furthered the implementation of the neoliberal agenda--aggressively handing out fines during his tenure, hitting NYPD Blue with a million dollar penalty for nudity, not violence, while giving the "patriotic gore" in an uncensored broadcast of Saving Private Ryan a pass. It was also sex that was on the minds of those who denounced Desperate Housewives in its early days, and the display of Janet Jackson's nipple at the Super Bowl, with the same carrying over to the censoriousness of One Million Moms and #MeToo alike. However, that was far from all of it. The reality was that Big Media was changing, with before the end of the 1990s HBO dramas like The Sopranos making NYPD Blue look tame by comparison--all as the Internet exploded the scene. Simply put, the culture moved on--and so did the struggles over the censorship of that culture, which rage on to the same noxious ends as ever they did.
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