If television indecency has deeply offended you during the past year, you apparently belong to a group quite exiguous in number. FCC chairman Michael Powell told Congress recently that - for the love of morality - 240,000 indecency complaints had been filed with his agency in 2004. Sounds like a lot, right?
Waal, Powell was supposedly unaware of the fact - recently publicized - that the advocacy group Parents Television Council lodged a Brobdingnagian 99.8% of those complaints.
In other words, less than 500 other Americans were offended by anything on television this year sufficiently to complain to the FCC.
What's the big deal?
The big deal is that the FCC does not itself enforce the mercurial doctrines and laws of contemporary morality, for fear of - oh, the irony - functioning in an Orwellian fashion. Rather, it lodges it sniper position in the American Kulturkampf armed only with the complaints of Good Samaritans who want to universalize their indictment of louche programming.
Of course, the Chimeric assumptions that enable this process exist only with a rather significant number of prerequisites, the most obvious of them being some representativeness among those glorified tattle-tales.
When the televisions of three hundred thousand Americans are being de facto regulated by one grassroots organization, one might naturally begin to question whether the FCC's town hall censorship crusade meets any rational standards of democratic prudence.
The problem is compounded when we all consider the raw political power of the FCC's preferences. Any organization whose scope of power is greater than the considerations of its oversight, accountabilty and investigative diversity should prompt objections from concerned citizens of all political ideologies.
However, it is also true that the FCC has gleefully transcended the Jeffersonian constrictions of limited government long before this revelation of moral oligarchy surfaced.
It requires a remarkable lust for nescience to deny the Constitutional problems intrinsic to this situation, but the Parents Television Council is apparently up to the task.
"I wish we had that much power," said Lara Mahaney, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles-based group. According to MediaWeek, "Mahaney said the issue should not be the source of complaints, but whether programming violates federal law prohibiting the broadcast of indecent matter when children are likely to be watching."
Mahaney inquired, with a willful ignorance towards Constitutional intent that astounds me, "Why does it matter how the complaints come? If the networks haven't done anything illegal, if they haven't done anything indecent, why do they care what we say?"
Let's roll out the laundry list.
1) The illegality of sexual innuendo, et al., is about as consistently defined as the exchange rate. The federal definition of indecency was most recently modified in Congress this year, but is perpetually reserved for FCC interpretation. The denouement? Networks lack a solid rubric of acceptable behavior to guide their programming decisions.
2) The fines imposed by the FCC are both extortionate and constantly being augmented by crusading congressmen. Business, for those unfamiliar with the subject, is about making money. Media organizations, for those unfamiliar with reality, are businesses. They tend to fear six and seven digit fines.
3) The smaller the number of parties that comprise the FCC complaints, the greater influence each remaining party exercises over the process.
4) The content and concentration of the complaints determine the exact application of the intentionally vague indecency laws.
5) The syllogism derived from 1-4 answers the question. Poorly defined laws that equate to de facto censorship are enforced with thousands of dollars in fines are capable of being aligned with the preferences of only a few groups. That's the problem.
However, our fearless Chairman of Morality, Mr. Powell, spent time gainsaying reality in order to defend the nonexistence of a problem.
"Advocacy groups do generate many complains, as our critics note, but that's not unusual in today's Internet world...that fact does not minimize the merits of the groups' concerns," Mr. Powell wrote in an op-ed column.
First, how exactly does the Internet reduce the diversity and prevalence of public opinion? Someone needs to brief Mr. Powell that the problem is not that the Parents Television Council penned approximately 339,500 complaints over the past year, but rather that there were only about 340,000 of them at the aggregate level.
Second, it is true that this distorted extrustion of democratic representation does not construct an implicit indictment of the Parents Television Council. However, it does naturally impugn the legitimacy of the government regulators whose legislative elbow grease is apparently provided entirely by the PTC.
Oh, well. It's not like the First Amendment matters much, anyway. If you are offended, though, you're in good hands. If you, like us, believe in freedom...well, we've got our work cut out for us.
The above work is the opinion of the author,
and not necessarily that of the Prometheus Institute.
