If you weren't watching TV on Wednesday, you missed some good cussin', on C-SPAN, of all places. That dull little cable network was carrying the hearing on the FCC's tough new decency standards, and the judges and attorneys involved actually used the F-word and the S-word, among other expletives. The FCC apparently didn't come off looking too good:
When Miller explained that the FCC policy was crafted largely to protect young children from indecent language, (Judge) Pooler asked why the FCC wasn't similarly concerned about violence. And when he said broadcast TV should be regulated differently than cable because it was more pervasive, and because some children had broadcast TVs in their bedrooms, Pooler argued that any parent who allowed an unmonitored TV in a child's room already was abdicating responsibility.
"You want to protect those children ... even when their parents are lax," she told him.
The slippery standards were made clear to anyone who watched yesterday. Cher uttering an obscenity live on the Billboard Music Awards? Unacceptable to the FCC.
That same utterance by Cher, if replayed on broadcast news putting these very Fox v. FCC hearings in context? Protected as news. But if the FCC seeks to protect children from any exposure, why is news safe?
The FCC didn't have persuasive answers to most of the tough questions posed yesterday.
I defer to no one in dismay over the coarsening of the popular culture and the belief that we need to stop exposing our children to all the vile crap they must now cope with. But wishing we would do something is not the same as wanting the government to order it so done. The Founders were fairly serious about freedom of the press, and the First Amendment was designed to let us all have robust exchanges of expression with a minimum of government interference. If the electronic media had been around the, they would have been included in the protection as much as the print media.
Of course if the electronic media had been around then, the deliberations of the Philadelphia convention would have been leaked to the 6 o'clock news, and we wouldn't even have had a Constitution written, but that's a different story.
