The number of indecency complaints ha[s] soared dramatically to more than 240,000 in the previous year, [FCC Chair] Powell said. The figure was up from roughly 14,000 in 2002, and from fewer than 350 in each of the two previous years. There was, Powell said, “a dramatic rise in public concern and outrage about what is being broadcast into their homes.”
All this reflects, no doubt, the latest Great Awakening of muscular Christianity in our country, as the Good Country People re-take the reins from the faggots and Jews and tofu eaters and uppity negroes and witches of the National Organization of Women, re-invigorating a war-loving gun-loving pollution-loving capital-punishment-loving Culture of Life in our long benighted One Nation under One God. Oh, but, what's this?
What Powell did not reveal—apparently because he was unaware—was the source of the complaints... nearly all indecency complaints in 2003—99.8 percent—were filed by the Parents Television Council, an activist group....
That's right. 99.8 percent of the complaints on the basis of which the creaking calliope of conservative media is coughing up the latest hairball of censorious moralizing are coming from a single location in culture -- a clatch of pinched church ladies and patriarchal prigs from some slaveholding swamp or tornado torn plain are dictating to the sprawling millions of huddled masses yearning to breathe free or at any rate enjoy the heady distraction of trash television just what culture should look like.
Reasonably enough, the article continues on,
The prominent role played by the PTC has raised concerns among critics of the FCC’s crackdown on indecency. “It means that really a tiny minority with a very focused political agenda is trying to censor American television and radio,” said Jonathan Rintels, president and executive director of the Center for Creative Voices in Media, an artists’ advocacy group.
But of course the snake-handling fascists of the PTC could not disagree more:
“I wish we had that much power,” said Lara Mahaney.... 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.
They really do talk this way. Bloated with power like a tick on a pig, the unslakable conservative lust for power is scarcely satisfied by a literally unilateral imposition of its wishes on the FCC, any more than Repugnicans are satisfied with the ownership of every branch of the gu'ment they claim to disdain. And then, incarnating indecency, they flutter and extol: "Won't somebody please think of the children?"
“Why does it matter how the complaints come?” Mahaney said. “If the networks haven’t done anything illegal, if they haven’t done anything indecent, why do they care what we say?”
Quite so. Why should we. Let's all stop now, shall we?
No comments:
Post a Comment