Slashdot Mirror
FCC to Fine Curses More Than Nuke Violations
DiZNoG writes "With Congress debating new higher fines for broadcast indecency in the wake
of last year's 'wardrobe malfunction' and Howard Stern's antics, Rolling
Stone has published
an interesting perspective on things. Rolling Stone did a review of fines
levied by other federal regulatory bodies, and has found the new indecency fines
disproportionately large compared to other fines. According to the article,
if the bill passes then 'for the price of Janet Jackson's 'wardrobe malfunction'
during the Super Bowl, you could cause the wrongful death of an elderly patient
in a nursing home and still have enough money left to create dangerous mishaps
at two nuclear reactors.' The article further states the largest fine the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission levied last year was $60,000, this new bill would
allow broadcast indecency fines up to $500,000. Glad I keep my broadcast cursing
to a minimum, now if I could only get a handle on those pesky dangerous nuclear
mishaps."
Lots of people see and hear things they term "indecent" when those things are broadcast over TV or radio.
And that results in lots of letters to Senators, Congressman, and the FCC.
It's democracy in action. Otherwise known as the tyranny of the masses.
I have always thought most of the sentences handed down for drug crimes are completely out of whack as well. People convicted of marijuana possession seem to get more time than ones convicted of, what seems to me anyway, far more serious crimes. So why should fines being handed down by two separate departments make much sense when compared.
Playboy magazine had an article some years back during the war on drugs (boy, I'm glad we killed all those drugs and only have partially nude pop stars and terrorists to deal with) comparing typical prison sentences for murder and rape vs. selling LSD to an undercover cop. Guess who the government thinks is more dangerous --- as measured by length of time served?
It just goes to show you where our (since I live in the US) priorities are.
We are a puritanical society.
When it comes to sex, language, drugs, and violence, the US will always favor violence over sex and language any day.
Violence directly helps the NRA & gun lobbyists.
Drugs directly help the pharmaceutical companies.
You don't see Hugh Heffner making big contributions to campaigns do you? Or the porn industry in general.
Ergo, there's no money in sex as far as politicians are concerned (other than paying for it.)
Even methamphetamines help the pharmaceutical companies. Who do you think makes methadone?
As for the nukes... well, our religious leaders yearn for all our children to be born in nuclear families. What do you expect?
... they'd be fucking loaded, a single 30 minute show would net them about $20m, the fines would soon equate to the combined GDP of all the third-world nations combined. US guests are sometimes amazed with what's being said, Jonathan Ross seems to faze them most... imagine Stern doing the Letterman at 8pm primetime on the biggest network... saying whatever he fucking likes and without no bloody adverts!
I thought it odd that Radio 1 now says during certain shows "this show contains strong language, if you easily offended please turn off your radio, if NOT please turn it up!"... now that's unreasonable, they just to do all that without warning or apology before, it's a bloody outrage... cunts.
Same sort of story there.. You get less time if you actually commit a crime and steal a cd then if you commit a copyright violation and copy the same thing.
Its all about who has more money..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Michael K. Powell is Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Chairman Powell was nominated by President William J. Clinton to a Republican seat on the Commission, and was sworn in on November 3, 1997. He was designated chairman by President George W. Bush on January 22, 2001.
a phy.html
http://www.fcc.gov/commissioners/powell/mkp_biogr
Don't be so quick to blame things on those who oppose your views.
The point is not that "people don't matter". Fines are a motivational tool used to enforce regulations. The level of the fine is an incentive to the individual or business to not violate the regulation. Fines must be set at a level that is prohibitively high, if a business can make one minor mistake and lose everything, the risk is too high and many people will not go into that business, and the cost of the increased risk, and the reduced supply will be passed onto the consumer. At the same time, the fine cannot be too low or it will not be adhered to. If show breasts, swearing, etc. only cost $60,000 per incident most networks would seriously consider running Sex and the City, the Sopranoes or uncut R-rate movies on prime time TV, because they'd make that cost up and more in viewership. This effectively defeats the purpose of the regulation because the fines are not effective motivators.
To be clear, my point is not that we should or should not allow Howard Stern, boobs, or Sex and the City on primetime broadcast television, rather I'm saying that fines have to be proportional or they prove to be ineffective.
For the grandparent who referred to the low fines for nuclear power plants. $60,000 was "the Nuclear Regulatory Commission levied last year". There is no information in the post or in the article about what these fines were for or what the maximum penalty for the plant would have been for a situation that could have actually led to a nuclear incident. For all we know that fine for not putting the wet floor sign up in the men's restroom after it had just been mopped.
To highlight that a breast is of more concern in modern day america than nuclear problems.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
I've always found it hilarious what they actually *beep* out of a British TV show... They can curse all they want, but they can't say: "Oh my G*beep*"
What's in the 'G' word that's so offensive?
Violating decency rules can occur accidentally. For example, a bystander yelling "Holy shit!" when watching a crash take place on live TV.
Such occurred on CNN when they broadcast the video footage of the planes hitting the WTC. The newscaster shrugged "I apologise for the language, but think it's appropriate nonetheless".
Said footage was aired HUNDREDS of times around the country, unbleeped, and the FCC turned a blind eye to it.
The major problem isn't the language, the psychotic religious right being in charge, who are trying to legislate morality.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
What's amusing about all this is that ClearChannel has been seen as heavily pro-Bush. But it seems that Bush's "activist FCC" may not be good for business, as they reported a huge one-time loss. That same article reports that their radio business is stagnating. Frank Rich said it best: Basically, FCC regulation is on the upswing, but you get between the people and their "Desperate Housewives" at the risk of your business model.
Do a google search on Davis Besse. Its the nuclear power plant that nearly let their containment vessel rust through.
As for the profitability of power companies versus media companies, First Energy, the owners of Davis Besse and some coal fired power plants cleared $878 million in profits just in the first quarter of 2004, and that was while they were stuggling to repair Davis Besse. Energy companies, thanks to deregulation, a blind eye from the FERC and the Bush administration, and a carefully managed shortage of power can charge as much as they want for electricty.
First Energy's name may sound familiar because they are also suspected to have been responsible for the blackout on the east coast.
Also reference Enron's scam to nearly bankrupt California by artificially inflating the price of electricity. California pled for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to step in since it was obvious Enron was colluding with several other energy traders to extort billions of dollars from Californians for electricty. Their illegal activity, since proven by tapes of their energy traders planning the scam, bankrupted PG&E, hammered California's economy and is still hammering it due to the still high cost of electricity, and of course helped put the Republican's in to the governorship. Now there was a situation where some regulation, fines and criminal charges were called for and to date the Bush administration has done nothing about it, and many suspect were in fact colluding with Enron to commit this gigantic fraud, both to help Enron's profitibility and to force a Democrat Governor out of office.
All in all these fines are just the New Republican Party and the Religious right waging war on New York and Hollywood liberals and striving to inflict their puritanical values on everyone. Meanwhile they are letting their rich friends and big corporate backers rape, loot and pillage the public in order to make handsome profits.
@de_machina
I don't remember bring up oil companies, but since they came us, I'm pretty sure I remeber the fine for the Exxon Valdez spill being more that $155,000. Fines proportionate to wealth. It's not perfect, but that's the model.
Yeah, I guess I'm funny like that.
I suppose you're right, there. I'm in in the TV world, so I don't pay much attention to radio. I think it's pretty silly to fine Stern, though. I mean-- the argument for censorship of broadcast television and radio is that, being on our airwaves free for anyone with a reciever, people might be offended by content the FCC deems obscene. These regulations are left over from the days of NBC Red and Blue, when there was no listener choice-- currently, though, there are many coices for the consumer. When someone tunes in to Stern, they know what they're getting.
I understand the fines are meant to keep a lid on how far the shock jocks go, but i think it's time we ask ourselves whether or not the government ought to have the right to decide what too far is for us. Can't the market dictate that? If Stern had gone too far, his advertisers would have withdrawn support.
Take me with a grain of salt, though. Being in Hollywood, I'm probably fairly disconnected with the moral pulse of America.
If you look inside yourself and cannot honestly determine the basis for your prejudice against homosexuals, you may want to consider the possibility that you have been brainwashed. I've known some homosexuals, and they generally had the same types of strengths and weaknesses that anyone else has.
Excluding the people who disagree, and then saying "everyone agrees" really doesn't tell us much. Not that I don't agree with your basic point, I just think you need to work on your argument a little.
Normally, I would agree - That sentence counts as an invalid argument.
In this case, however, it forms a central theme to the argument... Namely, we CAN disagree on whether or not Janet's nipple actually hurts anyone. We can throw various developmental psych theories back and forth, each supporting our point of view more-or-less equally well.
You can measure radiation levels. You can calculate economic damages based on evacuating and totally closing an area off indefinitely. You can count the dead birds in Alaska.
It strikes me as absurd that we would punish something that some people find vaguely "offensive" at anywhere near the level we would punish an objectively damage-causing act (It actually baffles me that we would punish the former category at all, but that gets into an entirely different topic).
True, my choice of phrasing committed a fallacy. But, IMO, a very revealing fallacy, once corrected.
Playboy has articles written by some fantastic writers, and of course fantastic naked women. I have oftenthought that Playboy should market a second magazine with the same articles, but without the distracting images, that make reading it in public something of an impossibility these days.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Actually, in Finland, they DO give out speeding tickets proportional to the offender's income. See this:
t m
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1759791.s
Thats a lot of money for going ~15 over (in MPH).
+++OUT OF CHEESE ERROR+++ REDO FROM START +++
Maybe the show generates that and makes it worth it, maybe it doesn't. The reason Infinity paid those fines is because the FCC was holding up paperwork for licenses when Infinity was trying to buy several radio stations back during the big radio consolidation crunch. Things were being "lost" even though the FCC isn't supposed to be able to do this, and Infinity at the time had plans to contest the fines in court. One might be able to argue that Clear Channel came into such power because the FCC effectively sidelined Infinity at this time, but that's another can of beans.
Gore Vidal was working on his surrealistic follow-up to Myra Breckinridge when the US Supreme Court ruled that 'communities could set local standards' for naughty words. Since the same book would be on sale everywhere, this presented a problem of being exposed to legal action on the whim of any local prosecutor.
He approached this problem by substituing the names of the Supreme Court judges for the naughty words. Burger, Rehnquist, Powell, Whizzer White and Blackmun became nouns and verbs for, well, you know.
Brilliant. Text came out like this:
"He Burgered her lustfully. His mighty Rehnquist thrusting deep into her forbidden, intimate Blackmum. She tried to stop him by grabbing his Powell's. She enjoyed it in the Whizzer White, but detested Burgering as against nature..."
Future versions of Myron, and foreign editions, lacked this feature. But it was wild in the original hardback.
Being politically conservative, I support ironclad enforcement of a few, reasonable laws. Once we decide that something "shouldn't be done," the penalty for doing so should not be so light as to be considered a "cost of doing business." This threshold might well be different for the entertainment industry than for other industries. On the other hand, I think that the FCC's obscenity standards are unreasonable. Stern's shows make money, because people seem to enjoy his antics. (I'm not a fan, but I'm not anti-Stern, either)
Being an economic conservative, I tend to view the Bush administration as favoring a few select businesses (his campaign contributors), as opposed to supporting an economic environment conducive to business in general. The FCC seems to be strongly favoring Cable television and Satellite radio over traditional broadcast media. The majority of the public seems to prefer a boob or a cuss word here and there, and are willing to pay for a subscription, rather than get "boring" content for free. The economically conservative view would be to relax the broadcast standards, and let radio and television stations provide content to meet market demand, as they see fit.
After all, if you owned a cable or satellite business, wouldn't you want (free) radio and TV to be as boring as possible? Wouldn't you contribute to a candidate who promised to do so?