Dec
7
2004

voices carry

Talk about the power of a squeaky wheel…

Mediaweek reported yesterday that 99.8 of all indecency complaints submitted to the FCC last year were filed by one group: the Parents Television Council. (“Activists Dominate Content Complaints” - 12/06/04)

Through early October, 99.9 percent of indecency complaints—aside from those concerning the Janet Jackson “wardrobe malfunction” during the Super Bowl halftime show broadcast on CBS— were brought by the PTC, according to the FCC analysis dated Oct. 1. (The agency last week estimated it had received 1,068,767 complaints about broadcast indecency so far this year; the Super Bowl broadcast accounted for over 540,000, according to commissioners’ statements.)

The prominent role played by the PTC has raised concerns among critics of the FCC’s crackdown on indecency. “It means that really a tiny minority with a very focused political agenda is trying to censor American television and radio,” said Jonathan Rintels, president and executive director of the Center for Creative Voices in Media, an artists’ advocacy group.

This comes a month after Buzz Machine writer Jeff Jarvis reported the results of his FOIA request for information related to the FCC’s censure of the FOX network over an episode of the show Married by America. (“The shocking truth about the FCC: Censorship by the tyranny of the few” - 11/15/04)

I examined the complaints and found that all but two of them were virtually identical. In other words, one person took the time to write a letter and 20 other people then photocopied or merely emailed it to the FCC many times. They all came from an automated complaint factory like the one I write about here. Only two letters were not the form letter.

So in the end, that means that a grand total of three citizens bothered to take the time to sit down and actually write a letter of complaint to the FCC. Millions of people watched the show. Three wrote letters of complaint.

And on the basis of that, the FCC decided to bring down the heavy hammer of government censorship and fine Fox an incredible $1.2 million for suggesting — not depicting but merely suggesting — sex on a show that had already been canceled because the marketplace didn’t like it anyway.

Related:

(Link found via Slashdot.)

Posted at 11:37 PM in culture, politics & bureaucracy, television

Previous entry: minimal road rage (design) | Next entry: quote of the day: liberal terrorist (quotable)

Comments

Related:
- Washington Post: “Fighting Indecency, One Bleep at a Time” (12/09/04)

What will it take for the Parents Television Council to make American television safe for children? Aubree Rankin and her colleagues have some ideas about that. It starts, they say, with the kind of research Rankin does, which can then be used to rally parents, pressure advertisers, lobby Congress and push the Federal Communications Commission to monitor the nation’s airwaves more aggressively.

They’ve been pushing hard. Broadcast indecency complaints have risen dramatically, from fewer than a thousand in 2001 to more than a million this year. Major factors contributing to the increase have been Janet Jackson’s breast-baring Super Bowl broadcast and the efforts of the PTC, which has generated the vast majority of non-Jackson complaints.

PTCers are not advocating censorship, they say. But they do want to turn the clock back — using democratic means — to a time when amoral sex and violence weren’t so in-your-face.

What stands in the way of their success? Oh, not much: Just the seemingly irreversible trend that has all of American culture becoming cruder and more explicit. Then there are the passionate defenders of the First Amendment who see the Taliban when they look at groups like the PTC, and the equally passionate defenders of the free market who argue that people must want sex and violence since they sell…

“It’s interesting to see the conservatives split,” says Tim Winter, the PTC executive director, by which he means “social conservatism versus business and corporate conservatism.”

“The media industry is run as a pure, free-market oligopoly,” says James Steyer, the founder of Common Sense Media, a rapidly growing, politically neutral San Francisco-based group that shares many of the PTC’s concerns about kid-unfriendly programming and which also rates shows for parents. “And in a pure, free-market, social Darwinistic world, kids lose every time.”

Posted by alykat on December 9, 2004 3:24 PM

Another interesting case of FCC indecency concerns with PBS’s Frontline documentary program:

We hope you will watch “A Company of Soldiers.” And we want to call your attention to a special problem that FRONTLINE confronted with this film.

As you might expect, the soldiers’ language is sprinkled with expletives, especially at moments of greatest fear and stress. As we edited the program, we were judicious, but came to believe that some of that language was an integral part of our journalistic mission: to give viewers a realistic portrait of our soldiers at war. We feel strongly that the language of war should not be sanitized and that there is nothing ‘indecent’ about its use in this context.

PBS stations were given the option of airing an edited or unedited version based on their own community standards. Broadcasting the unedited version carries some risk that the FCC would entertain complaints and levy a fine. Each public television station had to decide for itself whether to take that risk.

FRONTLINE does not believe the expletives used by the soldiers violate the FCC’s ‘indecency’ rule. They are not used in a “gratuitous” manner nor are they meant to “titillate” or “pander” - the terms the FCC uses to determine if there has been a violation. You may be familiar with the recent case of ABC’s broadcast of the movie “Saving Private Ryan,” which contained repeated instances of strong language, used in the same context as this FRONTLINE. It was widely reported that a majority of the FCC commissioners decided they would not support viewer complaints about the language in “Saving Private Ryan,” and outgoing Chairman Michael Powell concluded that the agency should not take action against the ABC stations that aired it because the language was part of accurately portraying the story about the Allied invasion of Normandy during World War II.

FRONTLINE thanks those stations who are willing to broadcast the unedited version, but recognizes the difficulty any station would have in deciding to take a risk that might result in a penalty. We encouraged all stations that could do so to stand with FRONTLINE because we believe what is at stake here is not only the particulars of this case, but the principle of editorial independence. We believe that overreaching by the FCC is at its heart a First Amendment issue. We think that the editorial integrity of future FRONTLINES is at risk along with many other types of programs, whether art, science, history, culture, or public affairs. Editorial decisions should be free from influence by the government and should be made in accordance with the standards, practices, and mission of public television. We hope you agree.

We hope you will join us for “A Company of Soldiers.” Tuesday, Feb. 22 at 9pm on PBS (check local listings) And after watching, explore our web site where you have the opportunity to express your opinion about the program and the issues it raises, at
http://www.pbs.org/frontline/shows/company/

Posted by alykat on February 23, 2005 11:43 PM

Post a comment

As a spam-control measure, your comment may require my approval before it will appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting. To avoid the moderation delay, consider filling in your e-mail address. It won't appear on the site, but I use it to whitelist frequent commenters so their comments appear automatically.


The following HTML tags are permitted (if you want to use them):
p, br, a href, b, strong, u, i, em, ol, ul, li, cite, blockquote