Thursday, March 16, 2006
Memo to Kevin Martin: GROW UP.
This latest round of indecency penalties is chock full of absurdities. A PBS documentary on "The Blues" gets slapped? Does the FCC chairman think he is doing any good with idiot rulings like these?
On the jump, Jonathan Rintels and the group TV Watch put the matter more elegantly.
Time's Jamie Poniewozik runs down the list of alleged miscreants and notes that Oprah was not, in fact, fined for her midday sex talk. "Lesson: The American people must be protected from indecency on extremely popular programs that they have overwhelmingly chosen to support--even at the cost of millions to broadcasters and taxpayers. But at the cost of ticking off Oprah? Let's not get crazy here."
The following statement was issued by Jonathan Rintels, Executive Director of the Center for Creative Voices in Media, in reaction to today’s FCC decisions on "indecent" television programming.
“Today’s FCC indecency decisions put creative, challenging, controversial, non-homogenized broadcast television programming at risk,” says Jonathan Rintels, Executive Director of the Center for Creative Voices in Media.
“These decisions illustrate the significant problems with the Commission’s enforcement of its indecency rules. They are vague, arbitrary, insufficiently attuned to the context and quality of the program, and bear no relation to “contemporary community standards,” as the Commission’s own rules require. They substitute the Commissioners’ creative and artistic choices for those made by media artists. And they will undoubtedly result in increasing amounts of self-censorship of protected speech by media artists and broadcasters.
“The Commission correctly notes that it may regulate indecent material ‘only with due respect for the high value our Constitution places on freedom and choice in what people may say and hear.’ That ‘due respect’ is not evident in these decisions.
“Especially alarming is the Commission’s fining of Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed documentary, ‘The Blues: Godfathers and Sons.’ Scorsese, one of America’s most respected filmmakers, produced ‘The Blues’ for America’s public television stations, a remarkable series of films directed by such greats as Clint Eastwood, Charles Burnett, Mike Figgis, and Scorsese himself. By using their often rough language, Scorsese’s own film accurately and beautifully captured the unique character of the bluesmen. The context and quality of this real-life documentary film should have mattered to the Commission, as it did when the Commission held that the scripted rough language uttered by actors playing fictional soldiers in ‘Saving Private Ryan’ was not indecent. That the Commission today held that ‘The Blues’ is indecent sends a clear signal to media artists and broadcasters alike that challenging and controversial broadcast television programming, already in short supply, bears a higher r! isk than ever before of being censored by the FCC. The likely result is that to avoid FCC sanctions, artists and networks will self-censor, or that their edgy programming will migrate to cable.
While some argue that the FCC’s actions protect America’s children, nothing could be further from the truth. As Creative Voices Advisory Board Member Peggy Charren, founder of Action for Children’s Television, and winner of the Peabody Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom has written, “Government censorship is not the way to protect children from inappropriate television. The right to express what some consider offensive speech is the price Americans pay for freedom of political speech and we cannot afford to risk losing that freedom. It is not in the best interests of America’s children to “protect” them from expression that is itself protected by the First Amendment -- unobjectionable and appropriate creative works that are challenging, controversial, original, and important.”
Unfortunately, these protected and salutary works – the very works many parents want their children to watch -- now risk being left on the cutting room floor as a result of the Commission’s expansion of indecency enforcement.
snip
http://blogs.kansascity.com/tvbarn/2006/03/memo_to_kevin_m.html