Rep suggests why indecency rules are “changing”

Randy Forbes (R-VA) is one of 19 US reps who sent a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski requesting that broadcast indecency standards remain as they are. He said he did not think the FCC’s failure to deal with millions of complaints in the past should lead to any changes.

The letter, sent 4/1/13, was prompted by the FCC’s call for commentary on its indecency enforcement, and also the concurrent FCC announcement that it was only going to focus on egregious offenses among the mountain of complaints that had be allowed to accumulate.

“The FCC’s inability to keep pace with the volume of legitimate indecency complaints should not be the basis for relaxing a constructive broadcast decency policy,” Forbes said. “It is unacceptable to relax the standard and expose individuals to words and images, no matter how fleeting, simply because the current standard generates too many complaints.”

RBR-TVBR observation: Chalk up one more entry into the stockpile of sketchy conclusions as to the FCC’s motivations.

Here, Forbes suggests that there is some sort of connection between the definition of indecency and the amount of complaints generated, as if an irate audience member says “I am truly offended by that content, and would like to lodge a complaint with the FCC, but first, I will read the definition to see if the content fits into the official definition.”

Seriously, how do people come up with stuff like this?

On occasion, a citizen will see something and complain – it may or may not be actionably indecent, but that doesn’t matter – if a citizen is so moved, the citizen will do it. The citizen is highly unlikely to spend so much as a nanosecond researching the matter.

Most complaints do not come from a single irate citizen – they come from thousands of citizens who may or may not have even been in the audience for the content in question, but are responding to a click-and-send campaign from one of the content-nanny organizations.

The FCC is not on the face of it considering loosening the rules, although that is a possibility. What it is trying to do, we believe, is devise a better definition of indecency that is has more bright lines and less gray area.
It is not in league with Hollywood to flood the airwaves with smut, as many of the nannies suggest, and it certainly has not embarked on some harebrained mission to reduce the number of citizen complaints via a definition change, as Forbes seems to be suggesting.

We would note that the vast majority of Americans do not send in complaints about television; they just watch it. The ratings tell us that there is healthy competition for viewers and listeners – a lot of viewers and listeners – almost all of whom find something to enjoy with no need for FCC intervention.