The Parents Television Council (PTC) released a new report today entitled Women in Peril: A Look at TV’s Disturbing New Storyline Trend. The report argues that “by depicting violence against women with increasing frequency, or as a trivial, even humorous matter, the broadcast networks may ultimately be contributing to a desensitized atmosphere in which people view aggression and violence directed at women as normative, even acceptable,” said PTC President Tim Winter. As evidence the report cites… Nicole Kidman. OK, it cites more than Nicole Kidman, but the 7-page report and accompanying press release does seem to place a lot of stock in the fact that, while being questioning by a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing about violence against women overseas, “Ms. Kidman conceded that Hollywood has probably contributed to violence against women by portraying them as weak sex objects, according to the Associated Press.” I’m not sure what Ms. Kidman was doing testifying before Congress on the matter of violence against women overseas — dare I suggest some congressmen were out for another photo-op with a Hollywood celeb? — but the better question is whether Ms. Kidman’s opinion has any bearing on the question of what relationship, if any, there is between televised violence and real-world violence against women. (Incidentally, if she really feels passionately about all this, is she prepared to go back and recut some of her old scenes in “Dead Calm,” “To Die For,” and “Eyes Wide Shut“?)
But let’s not nitpick about the credentials Ms. Kidman brings to the table or whether it makes any sense for PTC to elevate her opinions to proof of theory when it comes to a supposed connection between depictions of violence against women in film or television and real world acts of violence against women. PTC, however, suggests that’s exactly what is going on today. They allude to a few lab studies which are of the “monkey see, monkey do” variety — where the results of artificial lab experiments are used to claim that watching depictions of violence will turn us all into killing machines, rapists, robbers, or just plain ol’ desensitized thugs.
There’s just one problem with such studies, and the PTC report: Reality. 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:
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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 →
The Parents Television Council (PTC), a media activist group that routinely petitions Congress and the FCC for greater content regulation, recently released a new poll which they say proves that the V-Chip and parental control technologies have been a failure.
Their poll finds that only 11% of those surveyed said they used the V-chip or their cable box parental controls to block unwanted content from their television during the past week. And that result is virtually unchanged from a poll they took last September asking the same question. Therefore, the PTC concludes that recent efforts by broadcasters and cable companies to spend hundreds of millions of dollars educating families about these parental control tools have been a failure. And, unsurprisingly, the PTC feels that this again shows the need for government regulators need to step in and do more national nannying for us.
As I’ll make clear in a moment, the V-Chip and current television ratings are certainly not perfect. And I have no doubt that household usage of these tools is quite low for reasons I’ll get into. But let me first address what appears to be a rather glaring methodological deficiency of this PTC poll which makes it difficult to take seriously.
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