Over at Ars Technica, Matt Lasar does a nice job pointing out how the FCC’s quarterly indecency complaint totals have again been inflated by one group: the Parents Television Council. This is something Lasar has written about before and he’s one of the few journalists who continues to ask sharp questions about the ongoing manipulation of these statistics by PTC. As Lasar notes in his latest piece:
for the first quarter of this year, show the viewers relatively calm at 578 complaints in January, then 505 in February, followed by 179,997 in March? 179,997? Um, did we miss something? Did television really get that much more indecent in March? No worries. In these situations, we know what to do. We go over and check out the Parents Television Council‘s website. And sure enough, there’s a plausible instigator—a PTC viewer action alert crusade against a March 8 episode of the animated comedy show the PTC just loves to hate, Fox TV’s Family Guy.
This “complaint box stuffing” is something I wrote quite a bit about in the past, especially in my 2005 paper, “Examining the FCC’s Complaint-Driven Broadcast Indecency Enforcement Process.” As I pointed out there, “The PTC’s increasingly effective use of computer-generated campaigns against specific TV programs is a leading factor in explaining the large jump in indecency complaints in recent years.” Specifically, as I noted in that paper (as well as a Supreme Court filing with my friends at CDT), the FCC quietly and without major notice made two methodological changes to its tallying of broadcast indecency complaints in 2003 & 2004 that PTC requested: Continue reading →
Over at Ars, Matt Lasar has a piece about the need for better FCC indecency complaint statistics. He has been monitoring the wild fluctuations in indecency complaint tallies in recent years and wonders:
whether the agency’s indecency/obscenity statistics reflect spontaneous viewer response to the level of erotic/linguistic friskiness on TV or solely on the power of coordinated campaigns launched by groups like the Parents Television Council.
Indeed, PTC is the primary culprit. As I noted in my big 2005 PFF report “Examining the FCC’s Complaint-Driven Broadcast Indecency Enforcement Process”, “The PTC’s increasingly effective use of computer-generated campaigns against specific TV programs is a leading factor in explaining the large jump in indecency complaints in recent years.” The PTC has even taken credit for it themselves, as I noted in the paper.
How did the FCC’s indecency process get so screwy, and how did the PTC come to influence it so greatly? As I noted in that paper (as well as a Supreme Court filing with my friends at CDT), in recent years the FCC has quietly and without major notice made two methodological changes to its tallying of broadcast indecency complaints, both changes urged upon the FCC by a single advocacy group — the PTC — targeting broadcast indecency:
Continue reading →
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) lost another major First Amendment-related case today involving its recent efforts to expand the parameters of “indecency” enforcement for broadcast programming. The case involves the now infamous “wardrobe malfunction” that occurred during an unscripted 2004 Super Bowl halftime performance involving singers Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson. When Ms. Jackson’s breast was exposed on camera for nine-sixteenths of one second, the FCC immediately launched an investigation into the incident and fines were eventually levied on the grounds that the fleeting exposure of Ms. Jackson’s breast was a violation of broadcast decency standards. CBS challenged the FCC’s decision, leading to a legal showdown in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
In today’s decision,
CBS Corp. v. FCC, the three-judge panel of the 3rd Circuit ruled that the Federal Communications Commission “acted arbitrarily and capriciously” when it imposed a $550,000 fine on CBS for the incident. The court’s 102-page decision, which can be found here, was decided squarely on procedural grounds. That is, it didn’t touch the more substantive speech-related issues or precedents such as the Pacifica or Red Lion decisions that constitute the foundations of all modern FCC broadcast regulation.
The case is important because it now joins the June 2007 decision handed down by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Fox Television Stations v. FCC. That was the indecency case involving the FCC’s new policy for “fleeting expletives.” In that 2-1 decision, the Second Circuit ruled that “the FCC’s new policy sanctioning ‘fleeting expletives’ is arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act for failing to articulate a reasoned basis for its change in policy.” As a result, the FCC’s order was vacated and remanded to the agency. [And the FCC is now challenging the decision in the Supreme Court.]
This is very similar to what the 3rd Circuit said today in the
CBS case.
Continue reading →
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