Last night while driving, I was listening to John Garabedian’s radio show, “Open House Party” on the radio. He’s a DJ who plays a many-hour-long mix of dance/club/pop tunes on weekend evenings, and is syndicated across the country. While I was listening, he told this story (paraphrased; I wasn’t recording, and there’s no online streaming version of the show):
Last week, radio stations across the country received the CD of “Don’t P-H-U-N-K With My Heart”, the single from their upcoming album “Monkey Business.” Now, apparently a major broadcasting group objected to the use of the word P-H-U-N-K in the title, because they thought it sounded like another, dirtier word, so now the Black Eyed Peas are back in the studio recording a new version called “Don’t Mess With My Heart.” This is what we have to live with in this post-9/11 world under the rule of the Taliban.
While the rhetoric is rather heavy-handed, I applaud John Garabedian’s railing against censorship. I’d bet dollars to donuts he was referring to Clear Channel Communications, a media conglomerate notorious for its censorship and conservative values. But what’s next? “Play That Messy Music White Boy”? “We Want The Mess”? And that much-beloved classic 70’s rock band, “Grand Mess Railroad”?
The real culprit here isn’t Clear Channel, though, it’s the FCC and its recent massive increases in fines for “indecency.” Each incident can net them up to half a million dollars now — a huge victory for people who think the government can decide what we’re offended by more accurately than we can. True conservatives, striving for less governmental power, should be fighting tooth and nail against the mere existence of the FCC’s media-complaints division, which attempts to impose a non-majority-decided morality code on American media companies — governmental meddling at its worst. Instead, many people want the government to “protect” them and their children from words that sound bad and accidentally-exposed breasts, rather than take personal responsibility to deal with this stuff on their own.
In a sensible America, if a media company offended enough people, and those people wanted to punish that media company, they’d stop listening to/watching/buying that company’s products, and the company would be forced through market forces to change its policies. The true moral code of the majority would limit the companies’ use of words and images that actually offended them, and people would have to use their discretion before watching things that they knew might bother them, or letting their children watch television that might be unwelcome in their home.
