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Comcast Apologizes For Super Bowl Porn Glitch
DrinkDr.Pepper writes "Just after the last touchdown by the Cardinals, with 3 minutes to go in the game, approximately 30 seconds of pornographic material was shown, seen by an unknown number of Comcast customers in Tucson, Arizona who were watching the game in standard definition. Comcast has apologized (they used the word 'mortified') and is issuing a $10 credit to any customer who claims to have been impacted. Various news accounts suggest that the incident was a malicious act, but no one knows how it was done or by whom."
the day that a news source posts a full uncensored clip of the incident is the day society has truly moved on from the arbitrary taboos of old.
Of course it'd also be the day that such an incident would merit only a footnote in an "odd stuff" newspaper section.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
To be fair to the grandparent, he did say "with the family.".
I wouldn't mind virtually any amount of explicit content in ads if I was on my own, but I'd be unhappy if there were kids watching it with me.
Really? I sat in a bar and watched Superbowl. I didn't see anything that I'd consider particularly raunchy or inappropriate, and I didn't hear any complaints from the people around me either. Are Americans really this prudish when it comes to TV advertising?
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I submit that this is a cultural artifact.
You either see nothing offensive in ads with explicit content or feel that you can safely ignore it because you understand the difference between real life and the image of life that such advertisements would present. However, you'd be uncomfortable showing a child the same thing. Why is this?
I suspect there are a few reasons ranging the spectrum from cultural guilt, to superstition, and taboo abeyance.
Perhaps you'd feel responsible for educating the child on the differences between real life and the image of life that are presented by advertisers. In any other context, this is something we don't even think about. We know that simply eating breakfast cereal doesn't suddenly make you super-athletic and attractive. We don't have any difficulty repeating that to children, or explaining what's necessary to achieve those goals in the real world. But since our culture has placed such a strict taboo about imparting sex education to children, we feel incapable of telling the same kids that drinking beer and wine coolers doesn't make you attractive to half-naked dancers. We don't tell them that getting drunk in order to seek sexual gratification is a really risky, self-destructive behavior.
Arguably the latter is a much more important life lesson, but that same taboo forbids us from admitting that children have sexuality, let alone that they're even more vulnerable to being pandered to than adults.
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Never lived on a farm, did you. Yet through most of history most families did. And also lived in single room huts.
Exposure to sex isn't harmful to children. I have no idea why some people think it is.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Really? I sat in a bar and watched Superbowl. I didn't see anything that I'd consider particularly raunchy or inappropriate, and I didn't hear any complaints from the people around me either. Are Americans really this prudish when it comes to TV advertising?
Yes.
I'm amazed that among all these replies, no one has considered that my problem might not be so much the sex itself as much as the attitude toward sex? We're talking about commercials that objectify the people and devalue the act itself. Perhaps as a parent, I don't really want my kids to think of sex that way?
And besides. If we start allowing sex everywhere on television, that will soon be the ONLY thing on television. (It's getting pretty close these days.) There's always the desire to pander to the lowest common denominator. As an intelligent species capable of reasoning and critical thinking, we should be making efforts to stimulate our intelligence rather than pandering to our baser instincts.
For those of you who need the cliff notes version (probably the ones who think these commercials are "ok"): I don't want my kids to grow up to be drooling apes.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
To an extent I agree with you. The problem is the tremendous range of things that get called porn...all the way down to a woman nursing her child.
Porn, apparently, is anything that bothers someone somewhere that has any connection however remote to sex.
I'd be much more in favor of saying that children shouldn't be exposed to violence. That wouldn't work either, but it would make as much sense.
FWIW, banning the road-runner cartoons for excessive violence is just stupid. STUPID!! Some people seem to think that censorship is the answer to everything. They ban cartoons, but don't stop wars. Which is more violent?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.