Family Values: The War, and the FCC
Two items in today’s SF Chronicle caught my eye. The first was Jon Carroll’s weekly column in which he points out a disturbing trend in american media since the election: The war is getting less attention even as it gets more deadly. Why? Because the media failed to understand that faith and family are important. Bush may feel like he earned policital collateral in the election, but just because he got elected for his values, doesn’t mean we aren’t still fucked in Iraq — and it sure as hell doesn’t mean we should stop asking questions about how we can fix it.
The second article was Tim Goodman’s weekly TV column, in which he returns to the issue of the FCC and the PTC (for those of you who missed it, it seems that 99.9% of the “indecency” complaints the FCC receives are all from one conservative advocacy group). As Goodman points out, the FCC doesn’t initiate investigations of TV networks. They wait for the public to complain — one or more complaint — and then check to see if there’s merit.
For example: NBC was asked by the FCC to turn over tapes of the Opening Ceremony of the Summer Olympics. It seems that someone — maybe even just one person, or some folks at the PTC, perhaps? — thought there was too much dirty dancing from the Greeks. So Goodman proposes that people who think things over at the FCC are getting ridiculous should take matters into their own hands. Tell the FCC what you think of their policies; “clog the system” by telling them what shows you think they should investigate for (artistic) indecency.
