Peter Suderman of National Review Online has an excellent piece up this morning on the 2nd Circuit’s slap-down of the FCC on indecency. He argued that even conservatives — especially conservatives — should be concerned about FCC powers to regulate speech:
..from a conservative point of view…FCC regulation of broadcast speech creates exactly the sort of centralized, out-of-touch control mechanism that conservatives should want to avoid. One of the two measures the FCC is supposed to use when deciding whether or not speech is indecent is whether the broadcast is “patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium.” Does anyone really think the FCC is equipped to enforce “community standards” from its coastal perch in Washington? It’s like some Bizzaro-world notion of local governance: putting a single federal agency in charge of “community standards” for a large, diverse country.
Worth reading. (Content warning: contains words “heck” and “asparagus.”)
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