December 7th, 2004

Filed under:
The Long View
3 Comments »

Puritans Monopolize the FCC’s Time

From Crawford, we find this startling story of activism gone wild in the US:

What Powell did not reveal–apparently because he was unaware–was the source of the complaints. According to a new FCC estimate obtained by Mediaweek, nearly all indecency complaints in 2003–99.8 percent–were filed by the Parents Television Council, an activist group.

Now, I’m the guy who’s always saying, ‘write a letter to the people in power’, but this is too much of a good thing. The PTA really ought to exert some restraint, and understand that after the first, I don’t know, 50,000 complaints, they were just wasting the FCC’s time. I think the PTA spokesperson is missing the point when she asks, “Why does it matter how the complaints come?”

Comments: 3 Responses so far

Richard
December 7th, 2004
1:03 am

Or instead of asking them to restrain themselves, charge a dollar for each complaint made. Even better, double the price after every 100 complaints. So $2 for complaints 101-200, $4 for complaints 201-300, and so on.

How many people are going to complain to a government body then? Sure, the PTC could get around that by doing it in the name of individuals, but then they’d still have to pony up a cool million to make the same amount of complaints they did this year.

Unless there already is a charge for making a complaint, which means they can already easily afford it. Oh well, not allowing TV to depict what adults do in real life (you know, where they actually swear and have sex, and but don’t backstab each other and jump out of a burning jet while sipping a martini and talking on a cell phone) is as good a reason to not to watch TV as any I guess.

[Reply]

BCChinese.Net BC中文网Blog
December 7th, 2004
1:53 am

博客+赚钱， 绝对疯狂的成功案例 - Paying Bloggers to Blog and Blogger for Hire!

博客+赚钱， 绝对疯狂的成功案例 - Paying Bloggers to Blog and Blogger for Hire!

Ian
December 7th, 2004
3:56 pm

I’d just as soon put the PTC’s domain on the spam-trap’s blacklist instead of going into all this nicel-and-dime stuff.

Unfortunately, charging for complaints or blacklisting domains isn’t something that government agencies that deal with public complaints can get away with doing — it catches legitimate complaints along with the spurious stuff, and opens the agency to charges of making its services inaccessible to the public. Instead, most organizations like the FCC (or CRTC, or police complaints commissions, or what have you) discount submissions from lobby groups and maligerers that complain about everything, and do much the same massive form-letter complaints or comments. Unfortunately, the FCC’s recent behaviour suggests that they aren’t applying that standard to the PTC’s submissions…

[Reply]

Add a comment