FCC Revisiting Indecency?

Ever since conservative playboy Kevin Martin rose to the position of Chair at the FCC this March, the commission has been uncomfortably silent on the issue of indecency (directly following a full year of puritanical nipplegate backlash). Given Martin's history of hating on our 4-lettered friends (even in a patriotic context), we have been expecting the assault on free speech in Washington to intensify.

Today, the FCC turned off the road of inactivity concerning indecency, hiring Penny Nance, a Christian anti-porn activist, as a policy advisor (click here to read the full Mediaweek article). This move indicates that broadcasters are headed for another barrage of indecency fines.

Legislation that would make indecency violations more expensive than the fines for dumping toxic waste has been sitting on the back-burner in the U.S. Senate for a few months now. We believed that the bill's fatal flaw was dragging cable and satellite TV under the FCC's regulatory blanket, and still hope that this caveat will prevent the increased fines from becoming law. Censorship proponents like Nance and Martin want to force cable providers to offer a-la-carte options to consumers, a position which could possibly derail their campaign, considering the cable industry's substantial lobbying power. In any case, the battle is sure to heat up soon.

Thanks to Dave Mandl for the heads-up.

Comments

[Beep in Philly]

I know I'm addressing the choir, but I, for one, cannot get over how it's just a-fucking-okay to teach children -- and it's their concern we have at heart -- how to spend billions of tax dollars pillaging -- to put it "nicely" -- foreign nations; to preach mutations of virtue as compulsory ethics resulting in discrimination, self-abasement, and apathy; and to medicate the masses with tv schedules and drive-thrus. But it's not okay to hear the TRUTH of how we English speaking humans communicate. Ooohohohoho-no. That. Would. Be. Devastating! It seems far more important to bow down to the golden word and exalt it above all others. The Christian Bible explicitly warns against saying "God Damn" (per popular interpretation) but that's okay to say. You can say "god" and I reckon we each have the right to invoke damnation. But "fuck" -- the profound meaninglessness of it all. It's punctuation for crying out loud. While there are more words on the table than "fuck," this one seems to rise above -- and thereby represent - the others. It's tempting to legally change one's name to G. W. Fuck and run for office. Then one could legally plaster ClearChannel billboards with "FUCK for [office]." Then perhaps we could just "get over it" and move on to real issues.

Thank you Scott for staying the intercourse with "Annie's Song (clean radio edit)" [real] (courtesy of Bob W's July 29th fill-in for Monica) -- what more need be said?

[Bat Guano]

Shit.

Goddamn.

Get off your ass.

And jam.

[Listener James from Westwood]

Interesting instance of the FCC memory hole in action on TV recently. Burger King has introduced some loathsome new chicken-fries menu item, and the ads feature concertgoers watching a chicken-themed rock combo (they had fowl-styled headgear, like some gallimimetic GWAR) and wolfing these vile strips. At the end of the ad, in the lower-left corner of the screen, the URL coqroq.com appeared. Clever, more clever than I would have given the BK flacks credit for. Well, someone tweaked to the pun, and that saucy URL is no longer in the ad, although the website is still there. For some reason, it says we are now at war with Eurasia....