ryan.freebern.org

Recently, the Senate approved raising the maximum FCC fine for broadcast indecency to US$275,000, a significant jump from the current US$32,500 fine. The vote was almost unanimous: the only dissenter was Sen. John Breaux, D-LA, who’s retiring and doesn’t have to worry about reelection.

U.S. society has no interest in responsibility, largely. When something goes wrong, we love to try and point fingers. We’re loud and litigious. If we get hurt, it’s almost expected that we’ll sue someone over it. So when the government does something that helps us point fingers at someone else, we gladly endorse it. At least, those of us who don’t think too much about it.

The FCC is the government’s way of letting us not be responsible for what we, and our children, see and hear through the television and radio. Their rules governing “decency” attempt to punish broadcasters when they violate a high-minded moral code supposedly embraced by the majority of the people in the country.

What the FCC doesn’t realise, though, is that, as long as broadcasting is supported by advertiser revenue, decency in broadcasting is a self-regulating system. If a broadcaster airs too much that its audience considers indecent, the audience will stop tuning in, and the advertisers won’t pay as much. To maximise profits, the broadcaster has to find the right programming that is interesting enough to draw a large audience, but not indecent enough to turn them away. This works entirely on its own without the need for a third-party to regulate it. It will change itself over time as the audience’s opinion changes, and it will automatically compensate for different viewing habits of different groups.

It’s like the foxes and the rabbits. When the rabbit population is high, the foxes hunt and eat more of them, reducing the rabbit population, and allowing the foxes to breed. At some point, there aren’t enough rabbits to feed all the foxes, so the foxes die off. This allows the rabbit population to increase again, restarting the cycle. Introduce hunters looking for rabbit-meat into the equation, and everything falls apart. To beat the metaphor to death: the FCC is a hunter, and it’s using the AK-47 of decency regulations to shoot up the rabbits of boundary-pushing television willy-nilly, leaving us with a bunch of dead-fox shows.

People have been amazed lately by the pull of networks such as HBO and Showtime. These premium television channels have had a surge in viewership lately, and it’s not just because they’ve been putting together high-quality shows. It’s because the FCC-strangled broadcast and basic cable networks have been forced to tame their shows, making them less and less honest in the process. Not fettered by the same restraints, the premium channels have been able to air shows that people actually want to see, and have benefitted tremendously from it.

The FCC thinks it’s doing the American public a favour by saving them from having to make moral judgments for themselves. In reality, all they’ve done is managed to create a sterile, homogenised stream of entertainment that increasingly finds itself too stifled by inane decency guidelines to produce anything that regularly engages viewers.

Where has personal responsibility gone? The government is so keen on traditional family values, about being strong and smart and patriotic, but they don’t want parents to actually have to parent. They’re no longer trusted to be able to keep tabs on their kids’ television viewing, or make sure they’re not tuning into Howard Stern.

To top it off, the FCC urges people to issue complaints every time something in the media offends them. They offer many easy ways to file a complaint — an electronic form, an email address, a postal address, a telephone number, and a fax number. Anytime anyone is even mildly offended, they can file a complaint, with details about the occurrence and the perpetrators, and the FCC will take it into consideration and, if they feel it’s necessary, slap someone with a hefty fine. Where are the balances for this system? If the FCC receives a thousand complaints about an incident, who’s to say there aren’t a million other people who thought the incident was perfectly fine?

As it is, the broadcasters who violate these overly-conservative decency regulations are being punished twice over: once by the loss of viewers (leading to revenue loss), and once by the FCC. The FCC’s decency regulations should be eliminated, and government trust in people’s personal responsibility should be reiterated. Explicit show ratings should be instituted for every show (”The following show contains sexual situtations, explicit language, and drug use.”), and better viewership tracking methods should be employed to let broadcasters know what the people want. Only then will truly free speech be once again available on television and radio, and the public’s opinion be truly represented in these media.

This entry was posted on Sunday, Jul 11, 2004 at 7:41 pm and is tagged culture, media, politics, rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.