Dennis says I should blog a news item about the FOX TV network wanting to lower their already questionable standards. Here’s Dennis’ e-mail, exactly as received:
To: Doug Pratt
From: Dennis Rogers
Subject: Fox-y Ladies
Date: Thu 5:49p Dec 21, 2006
Okay, you have to make a blog comment on this. FOX, the preferred media of the Right is calling for more indecency! They are invoking their 1st Amendment rights like the ACLU. I can’t wrap my brain around this. But, this is typical of FOX, of course. If CBS did this, they would be blasting them! The conservative religious right and FOX — the first amendment for more indecency on TV! Maybe you can make sense of it. Fair and balanced? Someone should tell Bill O’Reilly!
Fox seeks overturn of ruling on FCC indecency policy
By Bloomberg News | December 21, 2006
NEW YORK — Fox Television Stations asked an appeals court to throw out the Federal Communications Commission’s broadcast indecency policy, saying it violates broadcasters’ right to free speech.
Fox, a unit of New York based News Corp., argued that the FCC has revised its 30-year-old indecency policy in ways that exceed the agency’s authority to regulate content on television.The case is being heard by a three-judge panel that sits on the 2d Circuit US Court of Appeals in New York. The focus of the case is two Billboard Music Awards shows from that aired live in 2002 and 2003.
In the 2002 show, Cher used an expletive. The next year, Nicole Richie used a series of expletives during the same program.
Fox argues the FCC hasn’t historically punished broadcasters for unintentional airing of expletives during live broadcasts.
“Speech that is indecent must be more than a single use that is offensive,” argued Fox attorney Carter Phillips of the law firm Sidley Austin Brown & Wood LLP.
While broadcasters and the FCC have been fighting over indecency issues for decades, the stakes increased this year when Congress authorized a 10-fold increase in fines to as much as $325,000 for each TV station that airs indecent material.
Fox said the FCC was making a “radical reinterpretation” of the broadcast indecency policy because the agency holds broadcasters liable for isolated, even accidental, uses of four-letter words during times when children are most likely in the audience.
The FCC didn’t fine Fox, saying it issued the ruling to provide guidance for the future.
“The fact that an utterance is isolated won’t immunize it against indecency regulation,” FCC attorney Eric Miller told the court.
In a filing with the court, the FCC wrote that its rules “simply do not permit entertainers gratuitously to utter the F-word and the S-word in awards shows broadcast on national television at a time when substantial numbers of children are certain to be in the viewing audience.”
The only Fox I like is my shrink (that’s his last name), and the lovely real one that has a den on our property. Tom saw it several times while he sat up in his tree stand during hunting season (he never hit a deer, don’t worry).
I agree with freedom of speech in books, etc., as Stephen King argues that it would be unrealistic to write a book about contemporary adults talking and never using the eff word when they got angry. He’s right! It wouldn’t be believable. (This is from his tome “On Writing”) He then argues that there is “a time and a place” for bad language, and too much of it is not good, either. He has no problem with bleeping it off the airways .