BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. July is Cosmo's "Special Sex" issue -- as if there were any other kind. What's on the cover? Well there's: Make His Lustiest Fantasies Come True with These Six Sizzling New Secrets and Yummy Naked Bartenders: Scope Out these Buff Boys and You'll Be Shaken and Stirred. You can catch up with Cosmo on most checkout lines where they're clearly displayed and so can your kids. Does that bother you? Wal-Mart thinks it does.

JAY ALLEN: What we are now in the process of putting in our stores nationwide, and it'll be done at--by the end of June, is a U-shaped cover on four magazines: Cosmo, Glamour, Marie Claire and Redbook.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Jay Allen is spokesman for Wal-Mart. He's talking about its new customized racks that will show the cover photo but not the text.

JAY ALLEN: This applies just to the checkout lanes, and it will cover the left and the right side of the magazine for the most part.

IN-STORE ANNOUNCER: Now -- in the Wal-Mart Product Spotlight -Right Guard Extreme Power Caps from Gilette.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Wal-Mart is the world's largest retailer, a white tornado sucking all manner of merchandise into its vortex, from housewares to clothing to culture -- as in books, CDs and magazines. Wal-Mart sells 15 percent of all single magazine copies and is the number one seller of DVDs. Wal-Mart dropped the so-called "Lad Magazines" -- Maxim, FHM and Stuff from its racks this month, so you won't be able to score the July Maxim's Best Damn Pickup Guide Ever. You also won't find a CD with a parent advisory label, because the CD section is highly edited -- literally. According to Wal-Mart's web site, roughly half of the 953 rap or hip hop albums it sells are scrubbed of potentially objectionable content. So is lots of questionable pop, proving the axiom that it's not just what you buy but where you buy that matters. [MADONNA SONG UP AND UNDER] Case in point, from the local record shop, Madonna's latest album. Here's the 13th song with a male singer.

FIRST MAN: I COULDN'T HOLD BACK.

SECOND MAN: WELL, WHAT'D YOU DO?

FIRST MAN: I TOOK HER TO MY PLACE.

SECOND MAN: YO-- DID SHE SIT ON YOUR FACE?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: That song's not on the Wal-Mart version.

ARTHUR ALLEY: You know, Wal-Mart prides themselves on being a family-friendly store, and pretty much they are I think.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But the tug of war over whether to place a fig leaf over Cosmo's cover took years, won ultimately by a consortium of conservative public interest groups assembled by such activists as Arthur Alley, president of a mutual fund group called The Timothy Plan. You were quoted in one article as saying it felt like David fighting Goliath.

ARTHUR ALLEY:Well actually we ended up being a lot more than David! Because the major ministries in this land stood together! People like American Decency Association, Morality in Media, National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families, Family Research Council in Washington and a couple of others, all sort of stood together on a united front, and that represents probably over 6 million constituents.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now that he's covered the covers at Wal-Mart's checkout, Alley's moving on.

ARTHUR ALLEY:Wal-Mart certainly has a lot of company and the goal is to address it with top management of these companies, one at a time, and try to lessen the blight of pornography or soft porn from the very common areas where it's just staring you in the face!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: July's issue of Circulation Management Magazine reports a summer chill in American publishing induced by Wal-Mart. One anonymous wholesaler affirms that other retailers have already followed Wal-Mart's lead and yanked the "laddie mags." Others note that in some places Wal-Mart is the leading source of magazines, and so it decides by its exclusion policies and by default what people have the opportunity to read -- or hear! [MUSIC] Jay Rosenthal is the leading counsel for the Recording Artists Coalition.

JAY ROSENTHAL:I know that Wal-Mart is one that does not shy away from making these decisions as to what records are going to be sold based on content. Sometimes the criteria is all over the place. You know? At times it's about sex; at times it's about politics; at times it's about criticism of Wal-Mart!

SHERYL CROW: [SINGING] WATCH OUT, SISTER WATCH OUT, BROTHER WATCH OUR CHILDREN WHILE THEY KILL EACH OTHER WITH A GUN THEY BOUGHT AT WAL-MART DISCOUNT STORES

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thus was Sheryl Crow's 1996 album banned from Wal-Mart.

JAY ROSENTHAL: The labels who sign acts are very attuned to the problems that could arise if one of their products is not going to make the shelves at Wal-Mart, so they may not sign a particular act or they may try and take an act and--homogenize them.

JAY ALLEN: You will never hear us talking about taking a moral stand on something or taking an ethical stand on something. What we represent are the Wal-Mart customers.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Wal-Mart spokesman Jay Allen.

JAY ALLEN: We are representing what we think our customers would want us to carry or not carry.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Could you do me a favor and if you could, give me a kind of thumbnail sketch of the kind of consumer that you're thinking about when you make decisions like these.

JAY ALLEN: I don't think you could, because what you're talking about is who shops at Wal-Mart, and everybody shops at Wal-Mart.

JAY ROSENTHAL:I don't believe that Wal-Mart-- effectively has any kind of understanding and pulse of their customers. I think they just understand the politics of it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Rosenthal believes that performing the role of moral guardian plays well among local politicians in communities where the superstore seeks to set up shop. [WAL-MART STORE AMBIENCE, MUSIC] Standing in front of the entertainment section, some of the new releases in the game department -- you have Grand Theft Auto: Vice City; Viet Cong; Battlefield 1942; Real War: Air, Land & Sea; Marine Sharpshooter; Operation Flashpoint; Soldier of Fortune. Wal-Mart has been accused of inconsistent family-friendliness. It bans sex and drug references but has no problem with guns or violence unless they're mentioned in a song by a rapper. The opponents to censorship tend to fall left of center, but when it comes to specific products, it's tough to muster much support for music that, say, advocates violence against women. It's hard to rally round those Cosmo and Maxim covers. I mean, they are pretty stupid. The right has the advantage there. At the Wal-Mart in Linden, New Jersey I approached a mom named Celeste shopping with her daughter near the DVDs. [WAL-MART STORE AMBIENCE]

CELESTE: We get some movies for her but generally is the Disney movies.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So it doesn't particularly bother you that there's a whole host of DVDs and CDs that you simply can't get at Wal-Mart because they've decided they're inappropriate for public consumption.

CELESTE: It's kind of nice in a way.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Yeah?

CELESTE: Yeah.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Tell me why you think so.

CELESTE: Well I think it's about time that-- that the world turned around and said hey -- we don't need all this garbage.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And so--

CELESTE: Somebody's got to start it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So the logical extension then, it might as well be Wal-Mart?

CELESTE: Might as well be somebody.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Most customers probably don't know or don't care that Maxim is gone, Cosmo is covered and Eminem never had a chance. Wal-Mart shoppers, like all shoppers, like convenience and low prices. Wal-Mart's Jay Allen told us again and again that the company does not make moral decisions; it makes business decisions. But if Arthur Alley and his conservative alliance choose to see them as moral decisions, well, that's good for business too. [MUSIC]