Coming soon to a TV near you: Near-unlimited nudity and profanity at all hours of the day.
As president of a nonpartisan education organization advocating responsible entertainment, and as a dad, I certainly hope this doesn’t happen.
Unfortunately, that seems to be what the Federal Communication Commission, or FCC, wants to allow.
The FCC brazenly announced last week that it’s going to open up a public comment period about whether to change the FCC’s rule on indecent programming and only pursue “egregious” indecency complaints from the public.
The trouble is that only pursuing so-called important or egregious complaints from the public about troublesome or offensive TV or radio content will only lead to broadcasters pushing the decency limits even further — possibly letting nudity or profanity air with millions of kids in the audience.
This is similar to a police department announcing that it will only investigate exceptionally “egregious” crimes. That leaves me to wonder what the definition of a bad crime is, and certainly makes me feel less safe.
Federal law limits the broadcast of indecent material to the times of day when kids are much less likely to be in the audience and makes no distinction for “egregious” instances.
Either material is legally indecent or it is not. It is unnecessary for indecent content to be repeated many times in order to be actionable, and it is unwise for the FCC to pursue a new course that will guarantee nothing but a rash of new litigation.
Any one with common sense knows that kids shouldn’t be watching nudity or profanity, but it is a fact that the limits continue to be pushed by broadcasters.
It is all but impossible to watch prime-time broadcast television today without being barraged by graphic sex, violence or profanity. If the FCC abdicates its own legal responsibility to police the airwaves, it’s natural that more content we don’t want our kids exposed to will become readily available. At the same time, Americans’ right to petition the FCC about that kind of content will become limited under this proposal.
The Supreme Court most recently stated that the FCC’s broadcast indecency authority was constitutional and that the networks were on notice concerning the commission’s enforcement policy going forward, so why would the FCC alter it now?
Perhaps the reason is that the FCC has grown tired of responding to millions of complaints from concerned citizens despite its legal mandate to do so.
The FCC admitted that it recently dismissed 1 million indecency complaints under this proposed “egregious” standard. The fact that the FCC dismissed these complaints means a complete change in policy already has been made without public input or approval from the rest of the commission.
And it connotes a change in indecency enforcement policy at the FCC that nobody knew about, with the “egregious” standard apparently having been adopted unilaterally by the FCC Enforcement Bureau, or perhaps by the chairman himself.
With a new FCC chairman to be named in the near future, we hope that President Obama chooses someone who will understand that the FCC is supposed to represent the interests of the American public as reflected in the laws passed by Congress, not the interests of the entertainment industry.
While I support and encourage public input on FCC proceedings, it is a system geared to favor Washington lobbyists who have access at the FCC and their entertainment industry paymasters who have no concern for our kids.
As such, we insist that the FCC give greatest heed to the voices of those who continue to support the broadcast decency law as necessary to protect their children.
Tim Winter is the president of the Parents Television Council (parentstv.org), a nonpartisan education organization advocating responsible entertainment.
