Memo to Kevin Martin: GROW UP.

This latest round of indecency penalties is chock full of absurdities. A PBS documentary on "The Blues" gets slapped?  Does the FCC chairman think he is doing any good with idiot rulings like these?

On the jump, Jonathan Rintels and the group TV Watch put the matter more elegantly.

Time's Jamie Poniewozik runs down the list of alleged miscreants and notes that Oprah was not, in fact, fined for her midday sex talk. "Lesson: The American people must be protected from indecency on extremely popular programs that they have overwhelmingly chosen to support--even at the cost of millions to broadcasters and taxpayers. But at the cost of ticking off Oprah? Let's not get crazy here."

The following statement was issued by Jonathan Rintels, Executive Director of the Center for Creative Voices in Media, in reaction to today’s FCC decisions on "indecent" television programming.

“Today’s FCC indecency decisions put creative, challenging, controversial, non-homogenized broadcast television programming at risk,” says Jonathan Rintels, Executive Director of the Center for Creative Voices in Media.

“These decisions illustrate the significant problems with the Commission’s enforcement of its indecency rules. They are vague, arbitrary, insufficiently attuned to the context and quality of the program, and bear no relation to “contemporary community standards,” as the Commission’s own rules require. They substitute the Commissioners’ creative and artistic choices for those made by media artists. And they will undoubtedly result in increasing amounts of self-censorship of protected speech by media artists and broadcasters.

“The Commission correctly notes that it may regulate indecent material ‘only with due respect for the high value our Constitution places on freedom and choice in what people may say and hear.’ That ‘due respect’ is not evident in these decisions.

“Especially alarming is the Commission’s fining of Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed documentary, ‘The Blues: Godfathers and Sons.’ Scorsese, one of America’s most respected filmmakers, produced ‘The Blues’ for America’s public television stations, a remarkable series of films directed by such greats as Clint Eastwood, Charles Burnett, Mike Figgis, and Scorsese himself. By using their often rough language, Scorsese’s own film accurately and beautifully captured the unique character of the bluesmen. The context and quality of this real-life documentary film should have mattered to the Commission, as it did when the Commission held that the scripted rough language uttered by actors playing fictional soldiers in ‘Saving Private Ryan’ was not indecent. That the Commission today held that ‘The Blues’ is indecent sends a clear signal to media artists and broadcasters alike that challenging and controversial broadcast television programming, already in short supply, bears a higher r! isk than ever before of being censored by the FCC. The likely result is that to avoid FCC sanctions, artists and networks will self-censor, or that their edgy programming will migrate to cable.

While some argue that the FCC’s actions protect America’s children, nothing could be further from the truth. As Creative Voices Advisory Board Member Peggy Charren, founder of Action for Children’s Television, and winner of the Peabody Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom has written, “Government censorship is not the way to protect children from inappropriate television. The right to express what some consider offensive speech is the price Americans pay for freedom of political speech and we cannot afford to risk losing that freedom. It is not in the best interests of America’s children to “protect” them from expression that is itself protected by the First Amendment -- unobjectionable and appropriate creative works that are challenging, controversial, original, and important.”

Unfortunately, these protected and salutary works – the very works many parents want their children to watch -- now risk being left on the cutting room floor as a result of the Commission’s expansion of indecency enforcement.

Today, with the V-chip, the ratings system, programming information widely available in print and on the Internet, and cable and satellite boxes that can block programs and channels, there are many technological options for parents to avoid television programming some might find offensive for their children. And there are always the low-tech alternatives of changing the channel or turning the television off.

There are also regulatory remedies far better suited to addressing the issue of objectionable television programming than censoring the content of television shows. For cable television, the Commission should act to give consumers the freedom to choose the channels they want and the power to avoid the channels they don’t want in their home. For broadcast television, we agree with Commissioner Copps’ statement that the Commission should investigate whether the increasing consolidation of television station ownership has made affiliates operated by non-local owners unresponsive to local community concerns about coarse content.

Creative media artists understand the Commission’s desire to address complaints, some well-founded, about television programming. But the Commission’s ‘cure’ for indecent programming is proving worse than the disease. It does not serve the public’s interest – including the interest of America’s children -- in a vibrant, diverse, creative, and challenging media. It turns the Commission, and the small group of determined activists who bombard it with canned indecency complaints, into the arbiters of what all Americans can watch in the privacy of their own homes. The vast majority of Americans prefer to decide for themselves what to watch on TV. The First Amendment gives them that right.

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TV Watch is the leading voice to promote parental control tools and information for TV as a better alternative to increased government control of TV.

Last night, TV Watch released this statement:

CHARLESTON, S.C., March 15 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Statement by TV Watch Executive Director Jim Dyke in response to yesterday’s FCC decision:

"Today's FCC decision and dissenting comments to some of those decisions reflects the challenge hundreds of millions of parents face each day - what television is appropriate for them and their family. While a small group of activists want the government to enforce their preferences on which programs adult Americans can view during their leisure time - the vast majority of Americans prefer to decide for themselves what to watch on TV."

"Parents have the information to make informed decisions about what their children watch on TV and the tools to enforce those decisions. We should let parents make those individual decisions instead of allowing special interests to pressure the government into choosing for all of us."

 

Comments

[Soonerthought]

Damn right, Aaron.

[Neil Ottenstein]

I think this round of decisions by the FCC is absurd. One thing that stuck out to me is that "Without a Trace" was fined only in places where it aired at 9 PM. It wasn't fined for airing at 10 PM on the West or East coast. Will these decisions prompt the networks to air such show at 10 PM local in all time zones in the future? Why does the FCC listen to people who go out of their way to find TV shows they consider offensive? Why do they not take context into account in their decisions? Why are they wasting tax payers' money on this?

Neil

[renton]

AMEN.

In the interest of "protecting children", they are sanitizing and homogenizing a world the kids won't appreciate once they get older.

Would any child really watch more than a few seconds of The Blues anyway?

[David J. Loehr]

Of course, my child managed to stay up late and might have been able to see the "Without a Trace" in question. Fortunately, he only saw it in broad daylight thanks to the wonders of TiVo.

I wonder if that means I should get fined for programming exactly when I would be able to watch it.

[Ed]

Just wondering:

While I concur that the fines are silly, and the "nanny-state" fear is true, what say you of liberals like the Soros-backed David Brock and his Media Matters for America site and their attempt to bring back the "Fairness Doctrine"? If that isn't Nanny-State, then what is?

[michaelj]

The problem with 'Without a Trace' is undoubtedly that the scriptwriters have suggested in other episodes than the one cited that the FBI has been politicicized to protect corporate criminals. We could do that. That would be wrong.

[Mark Jeffries]

Could the call of Media Matters to bring back the Fairness Doctrine possibly be because the right and the center dominate the cable news channels and the right engulfs talk radio while the prime source for unabashed leftist thought other than Air America, Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now!", is on a jerry-built network of pea-shooter FMs, public access channels and four-digit-number satellite channels? (And this is from someone who many mornings finds Goodman insufferable.)

And let's shoot down that jeremiad of the right that the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine made Rush Limbaugh possible--talk radio has always leaned towards the right because the right tends to be more provocative and entertaining on the air, which is what it's all about at the end of the day. There simply isn't enough talent out there good enough to be talk hosts to fill 24 hours on every one of 1,000 stations (it's much easier to get someone to play records and read liner cards about "the best variety of the 80s, 90s and today"). Satellite transmission made talk radio economically feasible for any radio station that wanted to go that route by providing the people that were the best at it--and whether you agree with Limbaugh or not (and I don't), he is at the top of the game when it comes to his kind. The Fairness Doctrine had nothing to do with it.