The FCC’s Indecency Witch Hunt
Since the Bush “victory” in November at the hands of the so-called “value voters,” far-right groups have set out on a course to refashion the public sphere in their own image. From the vast moral wasteland inhabited by degenerates like SpongeBob, to the dark night of the nation’s soul spawned by a brief flash of Janet Jackson’s breast, a vocal minority of moral activists have upped the ante, intentionally obfuscating issues of personal morality and taste with the values of the majority of Americans.
Outgoing FCC chairman Michael Powell hasn’t helped matters much. During a contentious tenure that began in 2001, Powell inaugurated a new era of censorship in the form of massive fines levied for the airing of allegedly “indecent” material, including even accidental obscenities uttered over the airwaves. Once his ad hoc policy was put in place, FCC fines for indecency climbed to nearly $8 million in 2004, up from a mere $48,000 in the year before his chairmanship commenced.
Powell attributed the change in policy—and the skyrocketing fines he handed out—to a transformation in the public mind, as evidenced by the public’s boorish reaction to the Janet Jackson Super Bowl Incident. In December 2004, Powell told a Congressional Committee of a “dramatic rise in public concern and outrage about what is being broadcast into their homes,” and cited an exponential increase in the number of complaints the FCC had received – from less than 400 reported complaints in 2000 and 2001, 14,000 in 2002, 240,000 in 2003 to more than a million in 2004.
But true to an administration whose motto seems to be “up is down,” Powell got his facts mixed up. It took a curious reporter for Mediaweek to note that according to the FCC’s own records, 99.8 percent of the complaints in 2003 were filed by a single right-wing pressure group, the Parents Television Council (PTC), a conservative activist group founded by none other than conservative gadfly L. Brent Bozell III, who also serves as president of the far-right Media Research Center. Despite its negligible numbers and ideological extremism, Powell’s willingness to play patty cake with the PTC has undeniably weakened the degree to which broadcasters feel free to push the envelope in their programming.
Indecent Proposal.As a result, a small group of cultural extremists has begun to influence what the vast majority of Americans see and hear over the public airwaves. For one example of the ripple effect caused by this marriage of far-right sensibilities and government regulation, we can look to this past Veterans Day, when a group of ABC stations refused to air Saving Private Ryan for fear of inspiring complaints and being fined for indecent language, despite the fact that the film had already been shown, unedited, in both 2001 and 2002.
And now that Michael Powell is stepping down from his post, there may be those on the left who will lull themselves into a false hope that some sense of reason might find its way into the FCC’s top spot. But they shouldn’t hold their collective breath.
In early February, Reuters reported that a measure passed the U.S. Senate by a vote of 46 – 2 calling for “Fines for broadcasting material deemed indecent [to] be raised to as much as $500,000.” The current maximum fine? $32,500. The report continues, “The measure would also require the FCC to consider revoking a television or radio station’s license if the broadcaster violated indecency rules three times.” The proposal also calls for an alternate $3 million a day maximum for a continuing violation, but does away with the idea of revoking licenses. Talk about the lesser of two evils.
First Tinky Winky, now SpongeBob.It isn’t just ill-defined notions of “indecency” that has the newly empowered right and their soft-headed stooges in the federal government scrambling to fine and outlaw free speech: children’s educational videos apparently cross the line as well. Into the fray waddles the Pat Robertson of the 21st century, James Dobson, president of Focus on the Family, another conservative activist group. At a black-tie dinner the night before President Bush’s inauguration, Dobson proclaimed that children’s cartoon character SpongeBob Squarepants (who lives in a pineapple under the sea) was being used to promote the acceptance of homosexuality in a “pro-homosexual video.” Dobson’s beef is with a video remake of the 1979 song “We Are Family” which uses the voices and images of SpongeBob, Barney, Rugrats, Winnie the Pooh, Bob the Builder and other cartoon characters, and is scheduled to be sent to 61,000 schools this month.
As if taking a cue from Powell and the rest of the right wing activist community, Dobson only gets his story half right: the video does not refer to sexual identity at all, rather the producer, We Are Family Foundation, calls on their web site for respect for the sexual identity of others along with respect for others’ abilities, beliefs, cultures and race. Apparently, this terrible message is what Dobson and his Christian brethren are so upset about.
One can only hope that clowns like Dobson, with their moral radar so finely tuned to the sins of tolerance and diversity, expose themselves for what they really are: regressive bigots who use the name of Jesus to get their own names in the papers. To be sure, having an FCC chairman who was more interested in making examples of broadcasters who crossed some invisible line than in standing up for free speech only added to the present cultural impasse. The best we can hope is that the silent majority of Americans won’t like the new censorship dictates being handed down from on high, and will rise up to put these moral regressives back where they belong: public access television.
Paul McLeary is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, New York. He also writes for Salon.com, The New York Observer and Social Policy magazine. We love him despite his adoration of the Yankees. He blogs frequently at: http://theatlas.blogspot.com/.
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