Free Republic

Dept. of delayed reactions By Aaron Barnhart TV Barn- The Kansas City Star June 29, 2006 Only now is word filtering down to the Parents Television Council that a scene from last week's "Rescue Me" might have been, well, skanky. Yet more evidence that the PTC doesn't watch the shows it wants off the air. PTC Outraged Over Graphic Rape Scene on FX’s Rescue Me LOS ANGELES (June 29, 2006) – The Parents Television Council™ blasted News Corp. and the FX Network for airing a graphic rape scene on an episode of Rescue Me. The graphic scene showed a man...

False Protests By Chuck Shepherd The Wilkes-Barre Times Leader June 28, 2006 The “indecent” CBS drama “Without a Trace” for which the Federal Communications Commission is proposing a $3.3 million fine of the network and affiliates was apparently complained about by only two (at most) actual viewers of the estimated 8.2 million who watched it that December 2004 night, according to FCC records that CBS cited in a June filing to the commission. Those two (and 4,209 complaints from people who apparently only heard about the show) did not start arriving at the FCC until 12 days afterward, which coincidentally...

TV Watch Statement on Government’s Role in Controlling What’s On TV: President Bush signs broadcast indecency bill into law, but is that what Americans really want? When the FCC slapped local broadcasters with a record $3.5 million in fines this March, it said it was reacting in part to an increase in public complaints about broadcast television. But a closer look at the pattern of complaints the FCC receives shows that the vast majority of individuals file complaints at the prompting of just two special interest groups, and complainants often admit they didn’t watch the episode in question. TV Watch...

June 7, 2006 Indecent Proposal: End, don’t mend, TV content regulation. Jacob Sullum Syndicated Columnist New York Post / Reason Online The overwhelming support on Capitol Hill for legislation that will dramatically increase the fines for broadcasting "indecent" programming suggests there's broad agreement that the federal government should get serious about cleaning up TV. But the more closely you examine the justifications for this crackdown, the clearer it becomes that the ban on broadcast indecency either goes too far or does not go far enough. Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), who introduced the Senate version of the bill raising the maximum...

Bush Vows To Sign Indecency Act FMQB June 8, 2006 After years of debate, yesterday Congress passed a new bill upping the fines for FCC violations for indecency. The House Of Representatives approved the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act Of 2005 by a 379-35 vote, after it had already passed the Senate. The President released a statement yesterday, vowing to sign the bill into law. "I believe that government has a responsibility to help strengthen families," said George W. Bush in a statement. "This legislation will make television and radio more family friendly by allowing the FCC to impose stiffer fines...

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--The U.S. House is set to vote on Wednesday to impose a tenfold increase in the maximum fines for broadcasting profane or other indecent material, paving the way for the measure to be signed into law. The Federal Communications Commission would gain the power to fine television and radio broadcasting stations as much as $325,000 per incident under the bill, up from $32,500 currently. Cable and satellite television providers aren't affected by the measure, which cleared the Senate last month. Congress began to focus on television programming in earnest after the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, when performer...

Indecency Complaints in Q1 '06 Surpass Full 2005 Count By Tony Sanders Billboard Radio Monitor May 30, 2006 There already have been more consumer complaints filed this year concerning obscene, indecent or profane programming on TV and radio than were filed for all of 2005. The FCC’s latest tally of such consumer complaints in the first quarter jumped by 118,115 filings this year to come in at 275,131 complaints for the three months ended March. That’s a 75% increase over last year’s comparable 157,016 filings received in the first quarter of 2005. For all of 2005, there were 233,471 indecency/obscenity...

PTC Praises Senate for Passing Indecency Bill Parents Television Council Press Release May 19, 2006 “Legislation Will Protect Families from Barrage of Raunch on Public Airwaves” LOS ANGELES (May 19, 2006) – The Parents Television Council™ praised the U.S. Senate for passing legislation that would increase broadcast indecency fines from $32,000 to $325,000 – a ten-fold increase. “This is a major victory for families. We applaud Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) for pushing through legislation that would help to protect families from the barrage of raunch that has flooded the public airwaves,” said L....

U.S. Senate Backs Ten Fold Hike in Indecency Fines By Jeremy Pelofsky Reuters May 18, 2006 WASHINGTON, May 18 (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate late on Thursday approved boosting fines tenfold to $325,000 on television and radio broadcast stations that violate rules on airing profanity or sexually explicit material. The measure had languished for almost 16 months, drawing criticism from family groups and conservatives including Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a likely 2008 contender for the Republican presidential nomination. Lawmakers demanded higher fines on broadcasters after pop singer Janet Jackson briefly exposed her breast during the 2004 Super Bowl football...

Profile: Indecency Warrior's Campaign Peaking- Brent Bozell's Push May Spur Legislation By Doug Halonen Television Week May 15, 2006 If federal lawmakers, as widely anticipated, soon move to approve legislation that cracks down on indecent television programming, the multibillion-dollar media industry will have to concede defeat largely to one man: L. Brent Bozell III. Mr. Bozell, 50, is president and founder of the watchdog Parents Television Council, the group widely credited for spurring the Federal Communications Commission to hand down millions of dollars of indecency fines to broadcasters over the past couple of years. The PTC is leading the lobbying...

More Government Control Over Television Endangers Conservatives -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By Tom Readmond May 10, 2006 Imagine yourself transported into the near future: say, the year 2011. A few well-organized liberal crusaders, incensed by the reduced influence of the liberal media and the emergence of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, successfully lobby a Democratic president’s FCC to harass conservative political shows off the airwaves by levying fines against them for using “inappropriate” language and harboring “adversarial” opinions. Limbaugh finds himself dropped by broadcasters slapped with federal fines for his “indecent” commentary and Fox News is continually battling a hostile FCC. If this...

Choosing What’s on TV: Should Big Brother Hold the Remote? By Jim Dyke The National Ledger May 3, 2006 There was a time, the rumor went, when mothers, fathers and children argued nightly over who got to hold the remote. But in 2006, what was once a domestic battle had been taken outside the walls of American living rooms. Where it went, did not matter; all that mattered was that someone else was watching, and deciding. In this Orwellian reality, a small, but influential, contingent thinks the government should police what’s on your TV. This group, which includes the Parents...

Indecency bill on faster track- Frist pressing for House version By Brooks Boliek Reuters/The Hollywood Reporter May 3, 2006 WASHINGTON -- Responding to pressure from fundamentalist organizations, Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., is attempting to jump-start legislation that would impose a tenfold increase on fines for indecent broadcasts, congressional and industry sources said. Frist is running a "hotline" on the version of the bill that won approval in the House last year. Hotlining is a procedure that allows the Senate to pass bills that are not expected to be controversial. Once a bill is hotlined, any senator with an objection to...

There was, believe it or not, a time when professors and teachers fought tooth and nail with parents and citizen groups in order to get sex education into classrooms. Now, especially in college, the curriculum and campus seem to offer little else. Recently, I was interviewed on the university newswire about the use of pornography in classrooms. The young man who conducted the interview said that he came to me for a comment when he could not find any professors who were against it. “I am writing to inform you of some problems Towson University in Towson, MD, has had,”...

By William F. Buckley Jr. Myrtle Beach Sun-Times April 23, 2006 It takes re-entry into a seemingly different life to read that there is still out there something called an Indecency Code. It lives, sort of, and is administered by the Federal Communications Commission. What brought on a reminder that such a code existed was the recent movement by TV networks to discipline the FCC. Their reaction was to a fine handed down against 111 television stations for running an episode of a show called "Without a Trace," which the commission found to be indecent in that it "depicts a...

LOS ANGELES -- Four TV broadcast networks and their affiliates have filed court challenges to a March 15 Federal Communications Commission ruling that found several programs "indecent" because of language. ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox, along with their network affiliate associations and the Hearst-Argyle Television group of stations, filed notices of appeal in various federal courts, including in Washington D.C. and New York. Some were filed late Thursday and the rest Friday morning. The move represents a protest against the aggressive enforcement of federal indecency rules that broadcasters have complained are vague and inconsistently applied. Millions of dollars in fines...

A government crackdown on indecent programming resulted in a proposed fine of $3.6 million against dozens of CBS stations and affiliates on Wednesday - a record penalty from the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC said an episode of the CBS crime drama "Without a Trace" that aired in December 2004 was indecent. It cited the graphic depiction of "teenage boys and girls participating in a sexual orgy." CBS said it strongly disagrees with the FCC's finding. The program "featured an important and socially relevant storyline warning parents to exercise greater supervision of their teenage children. The program was not unduly...

The Wolverine State is pioneering what could be a new approach to the prosecution of indecent material on cable television. Michigan's Supreme Court has established that the state's indecent-exposure law includes the prosecution of indecent programming on cable television. Through this law, the Michigan attorney general can prosecute national broadcasters that put indecent material on cable TV, according to Pat Trueman, senior counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund. "This may be of questionable legality, and of limited use in other states," he said, "but the Michigan Supreme Court has upheld it, and the end result is a state law can...

Sirius Satellite Radio Inc., which liberated radio shock jock Howard Stern from the federal decency standards that he felt had shackled him, is finding that freedom's just another word for $500 million to lose. Since Jan. 9, when Stern debuted on Sirius, pirated versions of the shows have been made available for free via several online file-sharing networks just hours after Stern signs off. The New York-based broadcaster signed Stern to a five-year, half-billion-dollar contract in 2004. (snip) A few weeks ago, when the first pirate radio stations began rebroadcasting Stern's show on unclaimed radio frequencies in New York and...

Howard Stern may be coming down with a Sirius case of the bleeps. High-level executives of the satellite broadcaster are developing an internal standards-and-practices document that will set boundaries for Stern and other shock jocks, The Post has learned. “It’s something that’s being taken very seriously," a Sirius source said. Stern's new show also is being broadcast on a time-delay, giving him the opportunity to censor the program — which he already has done. Stern moved to Sirius in part because satellite-radio services such as Sirius and XM — unlike free terrestrial radio — are not policed by the FCC,...