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Every once in a while, a really backward-looking idea blossoms in the strange, fervid mind of someone who actually has the power to try to implement it.
This is such a time, and this one’s a beaut.
In the heated and often silly battles over alleged indecency on television, we’ve railed against Michael Powell and his fine-happy FCC on more than one occasion. But the FCC isn’t alone in its crusade to ban or fine out of existence any content that a select few deem “indecent.”
The latest go-round comes courtesy of the chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska). At a meeting of state broadcasters gathered in Washington by the National Broadcasters Association on Tuesday, he dropped the bomb that he, along with several other senators, are looking into extending “to cable and satellite TV and satellite radio the same indecency regulations faced by broadcast radio and TV,” according to Mediaweek.
This proposal to expand the FCC jurisdiction to include the hundreds of paid cable television and satellite radio stations comes on the heels of the House of Representatives passing the “Broadcast Decency Act” in February — a bill calling for an increase of the basic FCC fine for “indecent” content from $32,500 to $500,000. The Senate is currently working on its own version of the bill, which calls for a minimum fine of $325,000.
Either way, if Stevens’ plan becomes law, cable channels like HBO and Comedy Central would either have to completely alter their programming or be fined into oblivion. If they chose to succumb and live, their appeal as edgy, mature, alternative programming would be tossed out the window, in effect giving rise to a couple hundred more versions of ABC, CBS and NBC.
What is at stake here is not the FCC’s erratic policy of fining broadcasters who cross an imaginary line while utilizing the public airwaves. Instead, what is being proposed is a new program of active government censorship of television and radio channels available only to those who pay for them. In other words, a curtailment of consumer choice. Once government gets into the business of censoring content that people actually pay for, what’s next — books? Newspapers? Magazines? (As we’ve noted before, a substantial number of Americans rely on Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” as their daily fix of what they consider “journalism.” And no less a voice than novelist Lisa Zeidner has declared HBO’s “The Sopranos” to be “literature” — indeed, perhaps the best literature, in her eyes, to emerge in recent years.)
The kicker to Stevens’ proposed bill is that the technology already exists for people to self-censor programming they don’t want to see. As Brian Dietz, vice president of communications for the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, a trade association, recently said in a written statement, “Cable technology already provides families the tools to block unwanted channels from entering the home, and leading cable companies will provide this technology at no additional charge to customers who don’t have the means to block unwanted programming.”
This “unwanted programming” can also be blocked simply by not subscribing to the channels that the viewer or listener finds offensive. The Center for Creative Voices in Media, a group which opposes further media consolidation, has been all over this issue, offers an insightful analysis, writing, “This debate may be between Old School/Old Media vs. Technologically Savvy New School/New Media — that Sen. Stevens, as well as some of his Hill colleagues, push the old Central Command and Control broadcast TV censoring solution for cable because they don’t know/understand the New School pro-consumer, pro-personal choice/individual freedom technology that’s out there now with more about to come down the pike.”
Let’s hope that the Old Schoolmarms on The Hill are brought up to speed before the choices of even paying grown-ups are reduced to an endless parade of look-alike entertainment and news programs that are afraid to push the limits.
–Paul McLeary
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