What a joke:
But it gets even better: I examined the complaints and found that all but two of them were virtually identical. In other words, one person took the time to write a letter and 20 other people then photocopied or merely emailed it to the FCC many times. They all came from an automated complaint factory like the one I write about here. Only two letters were not the form letter.
So in the end, that means that a grand total of three citizens bothered to take the time to sit down and actually write a letter of complaint to the FCC. Millions of people watched the show. Three wrote letters of complaint.
And on the basis of that, the FCC decided to bring down the heavy hammer of government censorship and fine Fox an incredible $1.2 million for suggesting — not depicting but merely suggesting — sex on a show that had already been canceled because the marketplace didn’t like it anyway.
We’d like our goddamn airwaves back, please!
(via some little blog nobody’s heard of)
One Comment
The FCC exists in order to protect the corporate interests who control radio broadcasting.
It was created out of basically noble impulses - chatter on the airwaves by amateur radio operators interfered with communication during the Titanic rescue operations, so the US Govt stepped in and took the radio spectrum away from the people and regulated its use. Of course, most of the interference was due to the crude nature of the technology (spark gap transmitters), and not to any issues that Government control could directly address, so it addressed an unrelated, more basic issue: access to the airwaves in any form became regulated.
As is almost inevitable, corporations started gaming the system.