WASHINGTON - The Senate Commerce Committee is expected to vote on Thursday over a bill that would give the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) back the power to enforce hefty fines over what it considers profane.
According to a report by The Multichannel News, Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller unveiled the bill moments after the Senate Appropriations Committee refused last Thursday to add nearly identical language to the FCC's fiscal 2008 budget at the request of Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), a vehement conservative and GOP presidential candidate.
Rockefeller will likely try, like Brownback, to release separate legislation for television violence, in an effort at lumping violence in with the agency's definition of indecency.
A recent FCC policy penalizing accidentally aired expletives was struck down — like Brownback's proposal — last month by a federal court, calling the FCC's proposal "arbitrary and capricious." Brownback's profanity amendment was attempting to essentially render that decision irrelevant.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did not outlaw the FCC's policy outright, but rather returned the case to the agency to let it try to provide a reasoned analysis for its policy.
According The Multichannel News report, FCC chairman Kevin Martin, who blasted the court ruling last month as hindering his campaign to clean up the airwaves, has consistently urged Congress for more authority to police radio and TV stations. Martin is also pushing a bipartisan federal legislation called the "The Family and Consumer Choice Act." The conservative bill would force cable operators to create a "family-friendly" programming tier, comply with existing federal indecency rules, or rebate customers who have blocked channels in a tier.
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