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FCC to Require Broadcasters to Keep Tapes of Shows
The Importance of writes "Under current FCC rules, in order to make an indecency complaint about a broadcast you have to provide "a significant excerpt from the program or a full or partial tape or transcript of the program." However, broadcasters aren't required to keep a tape of their broadcasts so, rarely, an indecency complaint gets dismissed for lack of evidence. But that is going to change. The FCC has issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking [PDF] [TXT] that will require broadcasters to maintain recordings of their broadcasts for 60-90 days. The FCC is also considering reducing what you must claim in order to enter a complaint, thus opening the floodgates for indecency complaints by groups like the Parents Television Council, which is already keeping the FCC censors busy. Doesn't the government have better things to do?"
Working for a radio station in Austria, we have about the same rules here (90 days, real airplay), and we saw it as quite a pain originally. We kept the records on mp3s wich got deleted after the "holdtime".
One day we got sued from a company that a moderator had said "offensive things" about them and at court the mp3s were the key to show that this wasnt true. Since then we see this also as a mechanism to be able to show what really got broadcast in situations like this.
That was my immediate reaction as well, until I realised that if you're watching a show on tv, or listening to something on the radio, which ends up having 'questionable' material, you wouldn't have had the foresight to record it on the off-chance that the show you are watching/listening to would be 'questionable'. How often have radio DJ's been given formal warnings for inadvertedly swearing on air - it happens, and people phone in and complain, but it's very unlikely that someone is sitting and recording the show just in case the dj says something colourful.
:)
Having said that, I personally am against the rush to censor everything that we see and hear