Besides, when Jerry Falwell blamed 9/11 on homosexuals, femanists and liberals, I thought THAT was pretty obscene!
I mean, who gets to decides what’s obscene, anyway?

An FCC that makes rules about media content is an odd artifact of a disappearing technological circumstance where broadcast communications reached people only though a few channels by means of a public resource — radio spectrum — allocated by the government. With that questionable justification effectively gone in this time of media proliferation, so too is the charter for FCC’s regulation of content.

Though people may argue that continuing these restrictions on speech is necessary to protect children, whether or not a dirty word is said on TV let alone that a child might accidentally hear it is completely insignificant. If children could only be protected from things by force of government, protecting them from isolated words would be much less important than protecting them from the more dangerous complete sentence and the insidious whole idea. And we would first target ideas like those that brushed aside the fundamental principles of our nation with some made up scenario about weird pornography. Then with the airwaves sanitized, if nipples and curse words remained to torment our children we could consider completely eliminating the point at which these things enter the home, banning both mothers, and fathers with hammers and thumbs.

Which prompted this from David Brenner: “Defining ‘bullshit’ as nonsense is bullshit.”

As they say in the Porsche ads, “There is no substitute.”

Yes, Showtime, a national TV network, is sending a program into the homes of millions and millions of viewers, a show whose very title is “so grossly offensive to members of the public who actually hear it as to amount to a nuisance,” and yet I haven’t heard of anyone rioting or setting fires or even forgodsake cancelling their Showtime subscriptions.

I’m in total agreement, Jeff; the FCC should be stopped. And you might want to ask Penn & Teller if they’ll kick in some support.

Most normal people would not tolerate beastiality, and yet it exists on the internet sans enforcement. I’m pretty sure CBS wouldn’t throw their reputation away, but without the FCC, what’s to stop some independent station in a local market to switch to BEAST-TV? Why would consumer outcry matter if they figure out some way of making money from a pervert base? I don’t think that’s a slippery slope argument, either; with no regulation whatsoever, there’s no reason why some stations shouldn’t start airing outright pornography 24/7. Not a slope: the day the FCC shuts down. And that will be a very rough day for people who have TVs and children.

Your argument concerning Janet Jackson I think contradicts much of what you’ve said in the past. Isn’t that one of the primo situations that you’ve objected to all this time? People protestd, but it was the FCC that put the muscle and the hurt on the networks *because* of the protests — and if I remember right, you complained at the time that the family organizations hyped objections — and yet you use the boobage here as an example of how the marketplace takes the *place* of the FCC. I don’t see how that follows.

Much of the other objections from others here are about the unevenness of enforcement: this word vs that word, vulgarity vs racism, different languages. The funniest objection is vulgarity vs racism: “bwah! FCC bans bullshit but not ni**er!” — the n-word and other racial epithets bothers me more than vulgarity, too (emotion!) but arguably (reason) racial epithets are more closely related to *political speech* than simply saying bullshit, tits, or even semprini. So this objection actually reveals even more childish hypocrisy in this complaint. You aren’t out for political freedom; you want to be able to cuss on TV.

The problem with all of those objections, though, is that unevenness of enforcement has absolutely nothing to do with whether there should or shouldn’t be FCC oversight. The FCC doesn’t exist to please college students or media experts, it exists to police the public airwaves for familes at large. So “unevenness” isn’t an argument for abolishing the FCC, it’s just bitching about the FCC.

Hope I’m not sounding too mean — these are friendly arguments, even if put forcefully. I think there’s actually some common ground that could be found between conservatives and liberals on reforming the FCC, but calling for huge shifts like this only begs for polarization. You’re asking the nation to suddenly accept opening the network standards wider than they ever have been, and I think you’ll really need a better reason for doing so than simply saying that “everybody” says bullshit.

One more thing… just an observation, not an argument… “bullshit” makes for *crappy* political speech (pardon the word “crap”). It makes the owner of a pathetic and weak argument feel and act like he’s won a debate, simply because he shouts out like a teenager. The person who “calls bullshit” loses the argument the second they say the word, even faster than if they say “Hitler”. If I weren’t in danger of falling into the same trap myself, I would be tempted to say here that I’m calling bullshit on calling bullshit. If you can’t debate without bullshit, all it proves is that you are *full* of bullshit.