FCC wants to regulate violence on TV

[schwa]

cable, too. With a Democratic Congress, there's speculation that the FCC will shift its focus from sex to violence. Recent happenings:

http://members.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0326/046.html

Is this any way to preside over one of the most important sectors of the economy? The Federal Communications Commission, created seven decades ago to oversee America's scarcity of airwaves, now sits astride a teeming trillion-dollar industry in an era of bandwidth opulence. Yet the FCC has spent five years bickering with the Fox broadcast network over a naughty word.

The 2002 Billboard Music Awards had singer Cher uttering a popular obscenity on Fox; at the same event a year later, on Fox, Nicole Richie dropped the f-bomb, too. The FCC ruled that a Fox station had been "willful" in its "violation" of federal law and agency rules but stopped short of imposing a fine.

Fox's owner, News Corp., challenged the ruling. In the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, lawyers for Fox and the FCC debated whether Nicole Richie was describing sex or merely being exclamatory. "You never know ahead of time what's going to set the commissioners off," says Fox attorney Carter Phillips. "It's inherently arbitrary."

Yet Fox's sibling cable network, FX, airs shows that would make a longshoreman blush--and the FCC legally can do little about it. If you want dirt, check out the startlingly explicit new drama, Dirt, on FX. The show's heroine, a gossip magazine editor played by Courteney Cox, formerly America's sweetheart on Friends, has frenzied (fake) sex with a sinewy, bare-derriered actor. She utters plenty of bad words. In one scene she finds a creepy, black-leather bondage hood under her mom's bed.

Not to worry, for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has a plan: more regulation. Martin now is maneuvering to extend FCC oversight to basic cable for the first time. The bespectacled, boyish Republican, who is 40, and the FCC soon will issue a report to Congress recommending that the FCC be allowed to regulate violence on broadcast and basic cable (doing so, the FCC says, won't violate the First Amendment). That could spark a legal war among regulators, cable and broadcasters and may end up at the U.S. Supreme Court, which sometimes takes a dim view of federal statutes intended to curb indecency.

The FCC is making "a calculated decision to use violence as the stalking horse to try to get greater censorship authority" and gain "regulatory power over basic cable," says FX chief John Landgraf. Stuart Benjamin, a law professor at Duke University, adds: "There is no case saying the FCC has any authority to regulate violence." He says the effort just might backfire.

Dirt unearths a dirty secret at the FCC. Arguably at its zenith in the era of Leave It to Beaver, when the three broadcast networks held almost 100% of the TV audience, the FCC is utterly outdated, outflanked and overwhelmed in the Internet Age.

Racy fare is but one front in this losing battle. In parceling out the airwaves, the FCC devotes skimpy spectrum to the booming market for 200 million cell phone users in the U.S. yet preserves barely used bandwidth for old UHF channels. In regulating phone service, the FCC rides herd over Verizon and AT&T but doesn't regulate cable systems that provide the same thing. In ruling on AT&T's buy of BellSouth (nyse: BLS - news - people ), the FCC issued a decree that AT&T must not raise prices to some business customers, as if AT&T were the all-powerful monopolist it was in 1960. Did anyone at the commission notice the sprouting array of new-tech rivals to the old phone companies?

Cable companies are in the same communications business but are far less regulated, says AT&T Chairman Edward E. Whitacre. FCC officials "are trying to do their duty, but they don't even regulate half the damned industry," he says. "You tell me if the system is broken or not. I think the answer is yes."

Only 12% of U.S. homes get TV over the airwaves as they did decades ago. Basic cable is now in 70 million homes, and 30 million homes get direct-broadcast satellite. Yet the FCC has 17 lawyers plus a staff of 16 poring over obscenity and indecency complaints.

Some 327,000 gripes were filed in the first half of 2006. In a three-year period the FCC scrutinized 28 offending shows--including an episode of the Fox cartoon The Simpsons in which Mr. Burns and Smithers enter a strip club. (The solons ruled that show not too offensive.)

This, amid a profusion of filth among the more than 500 cable channels, millions of videos online, and satellite radio, iPod downloads, cell phone downloads and more. The old networks get the contradiction: On Saturday Night Live on NBC in December, singer Justin Timberlake and a cast member sang a Christmas parody called "Dick in a Box." That drew 7 million viewers and 16 bleeps. Since then it has run intact on YouTube and has been seen 17 million times--and it was posted that way by NBC itself.

The networks still deploy dozens of in-house censors to comply with FCC rules. CBS, stung by the $550,000 FCC fine it paid for Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction in 2004, slaps a six-second delay on the telecast of Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. That gives the producers time to zap any streaker crossing the camera's path.

Federal regulators have held sway over indecent broadcast content since the radio era of the 1920s. In 1973 comedian George Carlin did his famous "Seven Dirty Words" rant, and the Supreme Court agreed with the FCC that Carlin's bit was indecent. (He'd be down to five today, since the popular, crasser words for "pee" and "boob" are now kosher on the airwaves.)

In 1988 the Supreme Court scolded the FCC for its vague definition of indecency and advised restraint. In 1994 the court ruled that the FCC, created in 1934 to oversee the airwaves, has no right to hassle cable channels on indecent fare.

Now the FCC will escalate its war on TV violence, but any effort to tread on basic cable could rile the Supremes. "The dominant thrust of the cases has been: No you can't," says Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment law professor at UCLA. ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox "use airwaves the court says belong to the public. That quite expressly distinguishes them from cable." Let's hope the commission's lawyers don't notice that overhead cables use public airspace, too.

The Supreme Court took a similarly stern view of Congress' ham-handed effort to curb smut on the Net, now used by 210 million people in the U.S. The court in 1997 ruled 9--0 to strike down the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996. Fox argues the FCC's "ban on broadcast indecency" is "substantively identical" to the restrictions the high court rejected for the Internet.

Undaunted, the FCC has issued indecency fines totaling $11.9 million since the Jackson episode in 2004--more than five times the sum in the preceding decade. Congress concurs: In June it raised the maximum per-station fine tenfold to $325,000.

Besides decency laws, the government offers decency technology, too. The V-chip, imposed on TV makers in 1996 to let parents block raunchy shows, is a flop in the marketplace (parental groups claim the rating system is inaccurate, rendering the chip moot). It's more effective to use the parental control options that come with the cable subscription.

So the courts may end up ruling on the whole mess yet again, and they are leaning in the opposite direction from the FCC and Congress. The old broadcast networks were regulated because of their "pervasiveness and accessibility," but they possess nothing of the sort today. So the courts are more likely to "raise the First Amendment protections for broadcast than they are to lower the protections for cable," says Duke's Benjamin.

Which raises the question: Wouldn't the FCC be better off simply freeing up more airwaves--instead of passing more antiquated rules?

edit: PTC: http://parentstv.org/

They're the people who spam the FCC with carbon-copy complaints. Out of touch with mainstream values is an understatement. For example, judging what they see as R-rated when it is really PG-13 (see: CapAlert)

[cage_bx]

thanks for the info

this sucks if u dont wanna see something on TV turn it to another one of the 300 channels u have....

[DocAltie]

It will never happen. Unlike normal TV, cable and premium TV have lots of lobby power.

[soon2Bbanned]

Democratic congress???????????????
So the rightwing religious bible banger Rebublicans like violence?
Republican John McCain likes mma?
I feel you, but c'mon with the partisan shit. I mean jeez, the article itself references a republican spearheading the effort. I dont understand you.

[somethingclever]

This does not pose a serious threat to the sport.

[Trikk]

I don't get why you people put up with the FCC. Worst come to worst you'd still have it on PPV and dvd/online download though.

[BrokeTec]

Originally Posted by DocAltie

It will never happen. Unlike normal TV, cable and premium TV have lots of lobby power.

Exactly.

If you have a premium channel, you paid for it's contents specifically for it's contents.

If you order Cinimax for it's cute kiddie cartoons it plays at 7 AM, don't bitch about the softcore porn it plays from 10 pm till the sun comes up.

[phizban]

don't they have more important things to worry about??

like ... some kind of war or something???

god i hate my government

[Rolland]

-- runs to order Cinimax --

[moeller61]

The entire reasoning for the FCC was to preserve the scarcity of the electromagnetic spectrum and telephone/telegraph wires. There is no reason whatsoever for them to have authority over cable, and I hope they don't get it.