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Michael Powell to Leave FCC
Anonymous Slashdotter writes "Michael Powell, chairman of the FCC, will be stepping down from his post soon. 'Powell, who maintained a light regulatory hand as the nation's chief media watchdog but collected some of the largest indecency fines against U.S. broadcasters, planned to issue a statement Friday but was not expected to hold a formal news conference, these officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.'"
his focus on promoting HDTV and digital communcations, deregualtion of the internet,etc. I suppose there is no point in giving him any credit in any of that since he is a republican. Since this is a tech site, check the Cnet article. I think that is more news for nerds.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Stern went on a 10 minute rant about it this morning.
Basically he said that Powell didn't deserve to be there, and was only there because of his dad (which he's said many times before). He also said that it probably wouldn't make any difference, because the Bush administration is still in power, and they will probably find someone who is just as bad or worse than Powell was about trying to enforce "indecency standards". That was followed up by calling Powell basically a two-faced liar who said that indecency should be controlled by the market, then "cowtowing" to pressure from the large conglomerate radio organizations, and allowing a few organizations to become very powerful in radio.
Hence the new reliance on delay systems. It gives the broadcaster a chance to review what's going to air before it does, and if something inappropriate comes along, they can (and should) hit the dump button.
I'm not suggesting that people are too prudish, and I'm not arguing that "anything goes" should be the policy, either.
I agree with the idea that if a show is advertised as for all ages, that's what it should be. But I also understand that things sometimes happen in live events that the broadcaster cannot predict.
If I were king, the solution would have been to propose fining CBS affiliates - all of them - unless they proved that they had installed delay systems and trained operators to use them, within 30 days of the order. So as to help prevent a similar situation in the future.
In other words, people make mistakes, and offering a chance to fix the problem is better policy than simply punishing for the sake of punishment.
On the one hand, people complain about the FCC slapping fines on large corporations for broadcasting media that they deem "inappropriate". Then in the very same breath, they complain about the FCC supporting large corporations. If the FCC was truly all about supporting large networks, they would allow them to appeal to the ever-increasing moral decadence of our society completely unharrassed.
Well, this is only the case if you view the Christian Coalitian as something other than a large corporation, right?
^_^
Anyway, what you seem to be gesturing at is that the FCC is currently in favor of "moral decency" standards on television, and also currently in favor of corporate-owned consolidation in the media market. Whereas the consensus viewpoint on Slashdot seems currently to be that we should have diversity of ownership and diversity of content (i.e., low regulation of 'obscenity') in the media market.
If you oversimplify the viewpoint commonly seen on slashdot to "OMFG CORPORATIONS ARE THE EVIL", then perhaps it doesn't really make sense. The trick here is that "OMFG CORPORATIONS ARE THE EVIL" is not the viewpoint actually being particularly expressed by anyone; it's just a straw man. Back in reality, meanwhile, it's reasonable to be opposed to policies that turn the FCC into a moneymaking scheme for an increasingly small number of corporate players at the detriment of both the citizen and the citizen's good derived from the public airwaves; and it is reasonable to be opposed to policies which allow a small vocal minority of self-appointed morality police to determine how the citizenry as a whole makes use of the public airwaves; and these two things are not in any way incompatible.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
And how has he done that? NO really....how?
BTW: I do agree that warning labels are not censorship. What is wrong with saying what the content is? Liberals hate this because they can't stand for truth to be known about anything they do. No one is saying "Don't listen to this!" or "You can't listen to this." The warning labels are there to say, "This product contains this content." In light of all of the hooplah over the MPAA and folks saying "I don't want to buy the whole CD, I want one song so I download." Well, think about buying your son or daughter a CD only to find out it contains lyrics about raping people and screwing animals. Don't they have some right to know about the product before buying it?