The President will soon sign legislation increasing tenfold the "indecency" fines the FCC can impose on broadcasters. Bill author Senator Sam Brownback (R-KA) declares this a "victory" for children and families. No doubt the President will as well, although he'll likely avoid repeating that "Mission Accomplished" thing.
More accurately, as I wrote here, this will be a triumph for a few Americans who want to control what they're NOT watching, but everyone else is.
We'll likely never again see on broadcast TV a repeat of a nearly three decade old show that featured several minutes of bare breasts, rape, bondage, whips, violence, the N Word. Yet Roots was beloved by America's families and was even required watching in some schools! Is keeping that off broadcast TV a "victory" for America's children and families?
What's remarkable about this whole "indecency" debate is that our nation's broadcasters, cable operators, regulators, and politicians all agree that parents should make the decisions as to what is appropriate for their children to watch. Yet they have combined to deny parents the freedom to choose the programming they want, and the power to avoid the programming they don't want.
The result is a regulatory regime of censorship, which is bad enough, but catastrophic and unconstitutional when done so politically, arbitrarily, and unrestrainedly as is the practice with today's FCC.
Instead, how 'bout letting parents pick and choose what channels they want to subscribe to on their cable and satellite systems, so the ones they don't want never make it into their homes? Channel Choice, when combined with TiVo, the V Chip, onscreen Program Ratings, other tools, and good ol' fashioned parental vigilance would constitute a more individualized and comprehensive family-by-family approach to the problem of objectionable content than today's chilling and blunt one-size-fits-all censorship.
So why don't parents have Channel Choice? The answer, of course, is money. Together, broadcasters and cable operators make a fortune selling consumers bundles, packages, and tiers full of channels they don't want. Talk about a business! Forcing people to buy what they don't want, or even offends them, just to get the few channels they actually watch! To head off looming Congressional threats to that super-profitable arrangement, the networks instead gave up any opposition to this tenfold increase in fines. This approach may be better for their bottom line, but it's lousy for everyone else.
Here's another way to deal with the problem of objectionable content without resorting to censorship: Return ownership of local broadcast stations to local communities. Over the past decade, broadcasters, regulators, and politicians have combined to massively consolidate local radio and TV station ownership into the hands of a few national media conglomerates. Local owners of broadcast stations are no longer around to say, "Y'know, that might be OK for your community, but it's not for ours."
As we found in our recent research study, when Clear Channel took advantage of "deregulation" to expand from 40 radio stations to over 1200, it replaced local programming on its new stations with Howard Stern and Bubba the Love Sponge. Beware the Law of Unintended Consequences - media consolidation and concentration unleashed Howard and Bubba in many smaller, more conservative communities. Voila - a surge in complaints against stations that had never before been accused of indecency.
With the FCC and legislators railing against "indecency" in the media, yet at the same time preparing to consolidate media ownership even further, it might be nice if they examined the roles their own policies have played in spreading what some consider objectionable content.
In the meantime, since everyone agrees it's up to parents to control what their kids watch, why don't politicians and regulators finally give parents the freedom to choose what they want to watch and the power to avoid what they don't? Instead of pandering to them by loudly declaring "victory," while quietly promoting policies that deny them real solutions?