Attention, FCC: You’ve got mail
Well, it started this week when NBC was asked by the FCC to turn over tapes of the Opening Ceremony of the Summer Olympics. It seems that someone — maybe even just one person, or some folks at the PTC, perhaps? — thought there was too much dirty dancing from the Greeks.
At first I though this was ridiculous then I read between the lines on the story below about the pressure group causing the problem — the PTC. It’s obvious that they have spam bots working full time. Bit the most sinister thing you can discover is that these folks are going after cable too!! Seriously. Expect cable to be regulated for content soon.
article on PTC here. Fighting Indecency, One Bleep at a Time
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.
She [Aubree Rankin] has collected the tapes of her assigned shows and fired up her Gateway computer and her VCR. She has faithfully typed in each obscenity uttered on MTV’s “Real World: Philadelphia.” It was an unusually tame episode, she says. “Last week they had people having sex in the shower.” She has also logged the show’s advertisers, among them Apple, General Motors and the U.S. Air Force, and she has moved on to “Sex and the City.”
Carrie is narrating, in voice-over: “As Samantha said goodbye to Mr. Sex Toy, Miranda said hello to Mr. . . . ”
Crudeness ensues in the form of a sexual pun. Rankin laughs. “It never stops!” she says.
the Greeks did something, um, “arty” in the Opening Ceremonies to annoy prudish “guns-not-boobs” America. That’s how it’ll read to the rest of the world as the story gets media play
Sounds about right.
Once they mandate “tape delay” of Olympic broadcasts – and censor cable and pay-per-view – anything interesting will move to members-only internet sites, with encrypted content.
Then, of course, they will complain that only pedophiles and sickos would need to “hide” behind encryption. 🙁
The FCC will be the death of broadcast TV and radio.
If I had owned a radio station, I would have directly quoted Dick Cheny’s “go f himelf” comments again and again until the FCC fined us.
Whatever the fine, the PR value would have been much more!