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Support The DrudgeReport; Visit Our Advertisers KERRY SUPPORTS FCC INDECENCY CRACKDOWN; CITES 'FAMILY TIME' Fri Jun 4, 2004 12:32:11 ET In an interview set for broadcast Sunday on C-SPAN, presidential hopeful John Kerry says he supports the current FCC crackdown on television indecency, but comes out against the greater scrutiny of pay cable channels like HBO and Showtime. "I think there is a distinction between public broadcast and the notions we've had historically about family time, family hour -- and what you buy privately and personally." "I am not in favor of government interference and censorship and restriction of...

"Have you no sense of decency, sir?" It was the classic question posed by Joseph Welch to Sen. Joseph McCarthy 50 years ago during the Red-hunter's hearings investigating the Army for alleged communist influence. With his query, Welch, the Army's special counsel, began the undoing of McCarthy. Unfortunately, the question needs to be asked again. It needs to be posed to shamelessly partisan Republicans who can't stand the fact that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are facing off against a Democrat who fought and was wounded in Vietnam. ***********SNIP************** Kerry criticized what our troops were asked to do in...

Decency is dead. Now we're fighting over acceptable indecency. .......The truly brazen authors of NBC's petition to the FCC say, "Live and uncensored programming is the hallmark of a free society." Oh please. It is the hallmark of NBC's need to produce quarter-over-quarter growth in the business it is in. Income and lifestyle needs aside, the truly serious writers and artists out there should consider where their true interests lie in the Bono/Golden Globe controversy. They should understand (and many do) that this claim of a constitutionally protected pants-drop is simply a race to the bottom that is sucking all...

Reuters Reuters Summit-FCC's Martin ponders indecency on pay TV, radio Wednesday February 25, 6:31 pm ET By Jeremy Pelofsky NEW YORK, Feb 25 (Reuters) - U.S. regulators should consider whether radio and television services carried by cable and satellite must adhere to indecency standards, Federal Communications Commissioner Kevin Martin said on Wednesday. Pressure has been building in recent months to address the growing coarseness on television and radio, with some lawmakers and regulators pondering whether the limits on over-the-air broadcasts can be applied to cable and satellite services.Rest of article at link

 A Passion for Pain There is a peculiar aspect of all religions that glorifies and embraces pain, suffering, and torment as virtues. The glorification of suffering is certainly not missing from the Christian religion, recently and wonderfully illustrated by Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.In my criticism [Passion Prattle] of Rebecca Hagelin's praise for the film as an, "artistic achievement beyond any scale you could imagine," I compared the brutality of Gibson's created images to the real thing depicting the atrocities of Sadam Hussein and the Taliban to point out how the religious, revolted at images of today's sadistic...

SAN ANTONIO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 25, 2004--Clear Channel (NYSE:CCU) today announced a strong new "Responsible Broadcasting Initiative" to make sure the material aired by its radio stations conforms to the standards and sensibilities of the local communities they serve. "Clear Channel is serious about helping address the rising tide of indecency on the airwaves," said Mark Mays, president and COO of Clear Channel Communications. "As broadcast licensees, we are fully responsible for what our stations air, and we intend to make sure all our DJs and programmers understand what is and what is not appropriate on Clear Channel radio shows." Mays said...

The other day, Sen. Zell Miller, the Right's favorite Democrat, gave a compelling speech in which he lamented the "deficit of decency" in America and pondered ways by which we might regain our moral bearings. During the speech he noted the many attacks on morality by the "Culture of Far Left America" and an out-of-control federal judiciary, remarking that it's happening in a number of areas "whether it is removing a display of the Ten Commandments from a Courthouse or the Nativity Scene from a city square" or "eliminating prayer in schools or eliminating 'under God' in the Pledge of...

February 13, 2004 Have They No Decency? The entertainment elites are angry. The little people (a.k.a. the rest of America) are interfering again. Those little people want to be heard. They want an end to gratuitous sex and violence on television. They want us to clean up our act. How dare they. "It's a hysterical overreaction," said an irritated Steven Bochco, creator of NYPD Blue, after ABC had discussed removing a sexually explicit scene from the drama in markets where it aired before the 10 pm time-slot. The network proposed the change in light of the public outcry over the...

BOOBY PRIZE by Timothy Rollins, Editor and Publisher February 11, 2004 With more than a week having passed since the Super Bowl bra-ha-ha in regards to the halftime show that I didn't see but couldn't help hearing about, it's clear we have an element in our society that elevates itself above the rest of us mere mortals. They're called celebrities. Whether they be actors, musicians, news and television personalities or even Members of Congress, they seem to think they're above the ordinary rules of acceptable conduct, common decency and even the rule of law that the rest of us are...

Albuquerque, NM – Congresswoman Heather Wilson at a hearing today compared Viacom, owner of CBS and MTV, to Enron for demonstrating bad corporate behavior by airing the Super Bowl halftime show that included indecent broadcasts. Rep. Wilson, a cosponsor of the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2004 (H.R. 3717), made the following statement at today’s hearing of the House Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee: “I was visiting my mother when the Super Bowl was on and called home just before halftime. We are very restrictive about television watching at our house, but we have a sports fanatic fourth grader who asked...

By Jeremy Pelofsky and Susan Cornwell WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Outraged by how salacious programs on radio and network television have become in recent months, lawmakers vowed on Wednesday to look at indecent shows on cable and satellite channels. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain urged cable and satellite companies to offer parents the ability to pick and choose what channels they get so they can protect their children from violence, sex and profanity, an idea that resonated with other lawmakers and regulators. Federal regulators and lawmakers have sought to sharply increase fines for bad behavior on over-the-air television and radio...

Keeping Abreast of the Culture Wars Yes, the Super Bowl half-time show was unfit for children to watch and just plain insulting to the rest of us. Most of the commercials made the humor from the movie Wayne’s World seem positively high-brow--old people being tripped, women being burned from torched horse flatulence, a monkey hitting on a woman. But network television didn’t just fall into the sink hole overnight. This cultural slide has been happening for decades and for decades those who were trying to raise public awareness about it were branded a bunch of unhip philistines, throwbacks to the...

In a videotape released to the media, Janet Jackson apologized for the breast-baring incident.

THE BATTLE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL by Timothy Rollins, Editor and Publisher Second in a Series January 7, 2004 Back in July, I penned a column "Back in the U.S. of A..." In it, I wrote how joyous it was to be home from Canada, and that while many Canadian people were indeed first-rate like they are here at home, they had a government that's gone totally amok and is completely out of control, and like California, Canada was not going to hell in a handbasket, but had in fact already arrived there - years ago.Perhaps it was even better...

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"/> September 3, 2003 Conservative Fights for Credibility in Recall RaceBy RICK LYMAN OS ANGELES, Aug. 30 — The next question comes from Scott, calling on his cellphone. Scott, what would you like to know from State Senator Tom McClintock about his campaign for governor against his fellow Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger and 133 other candidates? "Well, it's confusing to me why you and Arnold can't get together," said Scott, his voice crackling through the studio at KOGO-AM in San Diego where the state senator spent three hours taking calls recently. "My biggest fear is...

It’s time for all devout Christians to come to the aid of their cultureThe Vatican has issued a statement decisively opposing gay marriages and civil same-sex-unions; and Protestants dedicated to Biblical authority, particularly as it relates to culture, should join our co-belligerents in this vital battle that now squarely confronts us. We Protestants continue to have unshakable reservations about Rome — her monopolistic view of the Church, her realistic view of the sacraments, and her synergistic view of justification (for starters). We do not intend to paper over these honest theological differences. We will not surrender our theology based, as...

Just announced it on his show!

In 1939 Norbert Elias published a book called "On the Civilizing Process," with a strange and unlikely thesis: that the gradual introduction of courtly manners -- from eating with a knife and fork and using a handkerchief to not spitting or urinating in public -- had played a major part in transforming a violent medieval society into a more peaceful modern one. Counting indictments and comparing them with estimated population levels, historians on the Continent and in England found that murder was much more common in the Middle Ages than it is now and that it dropped precipitately in the...

A continuation of thread at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/887462/posts

<p>Our position is: Hollywood should worry less about trademarks and more about the filth in so many movies.</p> <p>Families put off by the violence, gratuitous sex and foul language in movies have prompted the development of sanitizing software and devices. Parents can patronize a chain of video stores (none locally) that offer cleaned-up Hollywood hits. Or they can do the job at home with the help of software.</p>