Janet Jackson Breast Flash ‘A Cultural 9/11′

Kenny Herzog of the Long Island Press spoke with Matthew Felling, media director for the Center for Media and Public Affairs, who called Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl breast flash a “cultural 9/11.” The difference is partly a matter of timing. “We’ve been flirting with this for years,” says Felling, “but it’s the fact that it was expressed to all Americans, rather than just a community, that made it hit critical mass….Not a whole lot of people watch the Grammys in comparison to the Super Bowl. If you have Opie and Anthony misbehaving on the air, their audience is peanuts. If you have the Virgin Mary with elephant dung at a New York art museum, not everybody’s exposed to that. But everybody saw Janet, and that really gave it traction.”