PBS stations canceled or delayed last night's Marie Antoinette documentary, and filmmaker Martin Smith is busily sanitizing his upcoming PBS Frontline documentary Return of the Taliban - just the latest examples of quality television programming censored to comply with the Federal Communications Commission's crusade against "indecent" content.
"Some Canadian soldiers are fighting," Mr. Smith said. "They're in combat, and they're going, 'Fuck!'" But that won't be in the final documentary, according to Rebecca Dana's excellent article in The New York Observer on the very real "chilling effect" of the FCC's efforts to "protect" America's children.
Some of those children are just a few short years away from choosing whether to enlist in combat against the Taliban. Sanitizing combat protects them?
"It's a really sorry state of affairs if we're Disney-fying combat," Mr. Smith said.
It is now clear that the FCC's campaign against broadcast indecency has backfired. Violent, sexual innuendo-filled, stupid, and other crud TV - the programming that so bothers parents of children -- is unaffected by the FCC crusade. Instead, the programming that is being censored, pushed back to a late hour, or dropped entirely by broadcasters is the very programming that Americans overwhelmingly want to see - some of the highest-quality programming available on television.
The high quality television "baby" is being thrown out. The "bathwater" is still there.
Martin Scorsese's The Blues: Godfathers and Sons, Steven Bochco's NYPD Blue - these are great television programs that the FCC has already judged indecent. Ken Burns's upcoming PBS documentary on World War II The War, CBS's 9/11 documentary, the classic Civil Rights Movement documentary Eyes on the Prize, Masterpiece Theater, Roots, and more - these are shows that experts believe may now be 'indecent' under recent FCC decisions.
Like it or not, many Americans get their information - including their news and history - from television. With the FCC forcing these great programs to be cleaned up, edited out, or eliminated altogether from television, the Feds are sanitizing our news and history.
"That's not helping kids, it's harming kids," says Peggy Charren, famed children's television advocate, founder of Action for Children's Television, and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. "Many parents want to watch this programming together with their children. By causing quality television to disappear, the FCC has taken a powerful tool out of the hands of parents who use television to open up a dialogue with their kids about controversial topics like violence, poverty, racial disparity, and cultural diversity. Consider how many parents watched Roots with their children and then engaged in a dialogue with them about the issues raised by that provocative program."
Plugging our own work, the Center for Creative Voices in Media documented this disturbingly wide censorship of high quality television in a report we recently delivered to the FCC titled, Big Chill: How the FCC's Indecency Decisions Stifle Free Expression, Threaten Quality Television, and Harm America's Children. If any of this bothers you, take a look at our Big Chill report, here.
Because we believe that when government censorship Disney-fies combat and sanitizes history, that's scary. Ver-ry scary.