FCC Indecency Rules Don't Apply to Satellite Radio

SirTwitchALot writes "The FCC has announced that Satellite radio services do not have to comply with the same indecency requirements as traditional broadcasters. Apparently this decision was brought forth by the complaint of a traditional radio station owner, stating that the FCC needs to "level the playing field." Chalk up a win for continued freedom on subscription services."

And

[Anonymous Coward]

How much does it cost that traditional station owner to be available in nearly every car and home in his area? That's what I thought.

So why can't free media have freedom of expression

[expro]

Pay a premium to have a medium that is slightly freer, yet the medium itself is just as controlled and subvertible.

You PAY for satellite radio

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see how they COULD apply. It's not public.

Re:"Privately owned"

[Monsieur Canard]

That's the gist of the argument. Any service which you have to invite into your home (in other words subscribe to) does not have to meet the same standards as any service which can be picked up accidently by a supposedly innocent bystander.

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

The FCC rules that FCC rules do not apply to things outside of the FCC's domain.

Again.

I can't decide whether I find it comforting these kinds of rulings keep showing up so often or worrisome these kinds of rulings are even being CONSIDERED.

kind of funny

[anti11es]

Kind of funny (and rather sad) how instead of fighting the censorship they would rather just have everybody under the same censorship...yey everybody loses.

Level the playing field?

[Faust7]

In a letter to the FCC, Levine complained that the commission needed to create a "level playing field" in protecting the public interest.

Yes! Once the playing field is leveled, to the ground, charred, smoking, apocalyptic, barren of expression... the public interest will have been protected.

Subscriptions, Privacy and Indencency

[Jahf]

The basic summary of the decision is that because you pay for the service you are inviting the information in (ahhh, reminds me of "Lost Boys" :) and therefore anything "indecent" is your fault.

I think the whole state of affairs is flawed.

1) If I am a well-off under-18 I likely have access to some form of credit account (even if it is just my debit card attached to my allowance). I can subscribe to one of these services much easier than I can to a satellite TV service because I don't need to deal with an installer.

Is it likely? No, and even then most parents aren't going to care as much. Doesn't change the lack of validity in the presumption.

Plus it doesn't stop me from listening to the music / talk / whatever being played by my friends and simply put satellite radio is a lot more portable than the Playboy channel.

2) I can get access to whatever content I want on the Internet ... and by going to a library can do so for free. I can turn on the radio or TV today and still see stuff that is considered indecent by many yet not by me. By equating subscriptions with privacy, we are forced into a culture where to get information we want we have to pay for it. It is the "new" thing today but it will likely be standard tomorrow.

3) It should be up to the adult or a parent and no one else what is indecent. I personally would MUCH rather have a teenage boy listening to Howard Stern enact boyish fantasies than to have that same teenage boy listening to a radical fundamentalist preacher telling him his thoughts are evil (and I know that the reverse is true for many). I may not consider the preacher indecent (though it gets close sometimes), but that just highlights the point AFAIK.

Point is ... we shouldn't have to pay to get freedom of expression and we shouldn't have to be subject to what someone -else- considers decent/indecent.

Free market regulates it

[Anonymous Coward]

Comedy Central needs these things called advertisers. They can't do anything too offensive for fear of scaring away viewers and thus the advertisers. They do show several movies completly uncut late at night.

That guy that complained...

[NitroWolf]

That guy that complained needs to be taken out an beaten. Rental cars? Please... if the customers of rental cars don't like the service so much, and find it so obscene, then they don't rent from that rental company any more.

Listening to Satellite radio is a CHOICE. You can't "accidentally" listen to it. You have to actively and willfully make an attempt to listen to it, and thus the FCC has absolutely NO grounds to censor it.

That guy is just a chump and can't compete in the market place, so he wants big brother to step in and fight his battles for him. People like that need to be removed from the gene pool.

I'm so SICK AND TIRED of being told what I can and can't watch/hear by other people. I wish there was someplace left on this earth I could go start my own nation. /sigh

Re:"Privately owned"

[Martin Blank]

Maybe this could be settled by opening a new market for television and radios where you have to call and pay a slight fee to activate the "uncensored" channels.

They have this already. Perhaps you've heard of cable and satellite services?

On occasion, Comedy Central plays the South Park movie, uncut, including the Saddam/Satan bedroom scene and all of the swear words. The run this after 10pm just in case, but it's still there.

Of course, you can still occasionally see some nudity on PBS stations, though they get away with it because it's artful and tastefully done, and some of the darker TV shows on the main three after 10pm would push the lines a bit before the whole Super Bowl incident.

Re:"Privately owned"

[Monsieur Canard]

If I buy a television or radio, plug it in, turn it on and tune it in I am inviting the signal into my house.

But you're forgetting the "Won't somebody think of the children" rule. If I buy a TV just so I can watch Pat Robertson warn me about the evil that gays and *shudder* liberals pose to my existence, what's to prevent my theoretical 5-year old child from turning on the tube and being assaulted by some tripe-spewing volcano of depravity (or an NBA game) coming over the "free" airwaves.

And v-chips? Pshaw I say. I can barely be counted on to form my own opinion when it comes to presidential elections. How am I supposed to regulate what my children watch?

Re:Cheapest shot I've heard:

[Just Some Guy]

More to the point, those drivers are not "people without subscriptions". They're renting a car from a company who has arranged for their use of a subscription service on their behalf.

In the same way, HBO is currently broadcast to millions of hotel guests who aren't directly subscribing to HBO, but who have access to that service due to arrangements that the hotel has made for them.

I guess that when you're getting desperate, every crackpot theory seems pretty reasonable.

Hey FCC, that's good but for an encore...

[Weaselmancer]

...how about laying off cable TV? I've never understood why the Comedy Channel has to edit their damn movies. They're not broadcast transmissions. You have to pay to get them, you can't stick a coathanger antenna out your window and receive them - so what's the problem?

Re:"Privately owned"

[Anonymous Coward]

So only people who pay their monthly subscription fee can enjoy freedom of speech.

Re:Subscriptions, Privacy and Indencency

[Otter]

This policy is what is known as a "compromise". Its purpose is not to make you personally 100% happy, nor is it designed to be fully resistant to any labored scenario, analogy or metaphor you might dream up. It's balancing the concerns of 300 million people, and seems to me to be a reasonable job of doing so.

Re:"Privately owned"

[Gordonjcp]

The whole Janet Jackson debacle should have been left to the free market. MTV/NFL pissed off a whole boatload of people and that was their fault for not understanding their market.

No, MTV/NFL pissed off about three people, the rest were whipped up into a frenzy by the press. No-one really cared until the media told them they should.

Over here in the UK, more overt nudity is used to advertise kitchen appliances and motor oil.

Re:"Privately owned"

[Jahf]

Yeah, I know. Having travelled to Norway, the UK and Ireland I am familiar with how weird U.S. television policies have become.

Interestingly to me, while there was more sexuality on overseas there were less crime dramas and less violence overall in those areas. I know which of the two I would rather a developing mind see.

Sponsors

[Anonymous Coward]

Comedy central does not get all of its money from cable subscribers (like HBO does), so it must get sponsorship. That means it must have shows that sponsors are willing to pay for. Since sponsors tend to get a bit gunshy around swearing and nudity, most cable stations have to avoid it.

Unfortunately, sponsor censorship is just a fact of life. If you want to pay for all of your own programming, subscribe to HBO (it's well worth it, IMHO), and get all the sex and swearing you can handle. If you want Proctor & Gamble to pay for your programming, you have to let them dictate what will not be part of it.

aQazaQA

WTF!?! this is totally stupid

[t_allardyce]

What a load of bullshit, this reminds me of the senator who after seeing the video of a marine shooting an injured insurgent in a mosque was outraged and said that embedded news teams should be banned! This is totally ridiculous - OF COURSE the playing field should be levelled, otherwise what is the fucking point of the FCC? The field should however (and this to me is like explaining that the earth goes around the sun) be levelled on the totally opposite direction - get rid of the bloody censorship altogether! WTF are these people smoking?

Now could someone please explain why a V-Chip like system (that either blocks out the audio/video when it gets the signal OR unblocks a scrambled audio/video when it gets the signal) has not been standardised to solve this stupid problem? All the FCC needs to do is find out how many people oppose censorship vs how many are in favour and then decide which system to use and therefore who has to buy new radios/tvs or adaptors if they want to take advantage of it, it really is that simple. Or just do what the rest of the world does and not get so anal about hearing people swear.

Re:Indecency?

[t_allardyce]

Sounds like censorship? It is censorship. And not only is it unconstitutional, its also totally pointless because a technological solution exists that would make both sides happy. I think its probably the case that the pro-censorship side not only wants censorship for themselves, but also wants to force it on everyone else because "no-one should be allowed to watch that filth" - sounds like facism? yep it is.

Re:WTF!?! this is totally stupid

[HarveyBirdman]

otherwise what is the fucking point of the FCC?

Spectrum management. Period.

I know why this problem exists

[HarveyBirdman]

Here is the source of the problem: idiots.

On both sides.

On one side are those who would just make every other word in a script a four letter one. South Park did a great parody of this in their "shit" episode. It started as one network show saying the word "shit" once, to an episode of Drew Carrey where people just yammered "Shit shit shitty shitter shit shit..."

And on the other side there's the people whose heads explode if someone uses the word "hell" even in an academic context, or the letters c, o, n, d, o and m are used in close proximity to one another.

So you have to find some balance. It seemed like we had it for a long time. I'm not entirely sure what happened to make it all start resonating.

You don't don't want to censor to the point where only two year olds are served by the airwaves, and you don't want zero restraint that allows the airwaves to degrade into a river of shit. Neither state serves the public interest. Both cases are catering to a lowest common denominator, albeit different types- idiots who are idiots because they are 2 years old, or idiots who are idiots because they are dumbfuck asshats.

The solution is to kill more people.

Re:"Privately owned"

[ATMAvatar]

"If you suck on a tit the movie gets an R rating. If you hack the tit off with an axe it will be PG."
Jack Nicholson

Re:And

[gcaseye6677]

Exactly. If the dude wants a level playing field by applying the indecency standards, we would then have to continue making it level by requiring listeners to subscribe to his station. How many people would be willing to pay and how much revenue would he make compared to the traditional model of ad sales? Sounds like he either didn't think this one through or he was just hoping he could trick the FCC into giving broadcast radio an unfair advantage by placing unconstitutional speech restrictions on a private network.

Paid Free Speech Zone...

[Anita Coney]

So basically in the US you have to pay extra to get the right to free speech.

At least until Howard Stern starts on satellite

[nittacci]

The FCC will leave satellite radio along until Howard Stern creates a big splash by broadcasting on Sirius. Then, we're going to see the same sort of religious-right-backsplash we've seen all along, and the FCC will respond. They seem to have it in for that dude, especially after he stopped supporting Bush. This is going to continue until the entire media is one big Sinclair/Clear Channel/Republican ghetto. I accidentally surfed the AM band recently in Chicago, and couldn't believe what I found. Three 50k watt Christian stations, FOUR totally conservative talk stations, and the one station that could be relied upon to stay sane, WCFL (Chicago Federation of Labor), broadasting ESPN! So there. Anybody who believes in freedom, it's time to kiss your ass, or your country, goodbye.

Re:"Privately owned"

[iocat]

People who bitch about their children getting access to things which they should have prevented them getting access to (internet porn, bad tv, inappropriate videogames, guns, drugs) should immediately have their children taken away from them. They are unfit parents. If they want the government to be a giant nanny, they should cede all parental control to the government.

It's really not *that* hard to control a kid's access to media, it just takes a modicum of discipline on the part of the parent. (Speaking from experience as a parent with reasonably high standards about what constitutes acceptable viewing material.)

Re:Sweet

[scmason]

I agree with the ruling, but that does not change the fact that Howard Stern is a disgusting pig.

Re:I know why this problem exists

[imthesponge]

"A lack of intelligence and creativity" isn't grounds for censorship. There's plenty of stupid things on, but would it be okay for the government to determine what is too stupid for people to watch?

Re:Sweet

[SydShamino]

Indeed, he is a disgusting pig, that, somehow, has turned out to be on my side of upcoming Freedom Wars.

It doesn't mean that I like him. It just means that he and I both understand: he has a right to exist, and I have a right to dislike him. And both of us will defend each other's rights, because if I let the (capital R) Right take him then I know I'll be next.

It's really strange to me...

[kataflok]

that a country with practically a full length lead over the entire modern world in gun violence cares so much about nipples.

Can we say, "Misguided?"

Re:"Privately owned"

[iamacat]

Speaking from experience as a parent with reasonably high standards about what constitutes acceptable viewing material.

Maybe you can explain to the rest of us what's so bad about a human body that your children would be harmed by some images of Janet Jackson? They didn't nurse with a blindfold after all. Or is it just a control thing?