Over the past few months, the cable industry has been faced with a double-barreled onslaught. Congress – specifically Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Aka.), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee – has been making noises about requiring the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to hold cable and satellite programming to the same "decency" standards as broadcast media.
In addition, FCC head Kevin Martin, at Stevens' hearings on "Indecency in the Media" on Nov. 29, announced a revamping of a recent FCC study that, this time, allegedly would show that "a la carte" cable programming would be cheaper than program packages – a 180 degree reversal from the FCC's initial study of the issue.
Now comes the news that National Cable & Telecommunications Association President Kyle McSlarrow has outlined plans for a number of cable operators voluntarily to start selling "family tier" programming; in other words, packages of channels with offerings such as Nickelodeon, FOX Family, ABC Family, Disney and others that, operators hope, will be so inoffensive to indecency-obsessed adults that the organizations that cater to these prudes, such as Parents Television Council, will get off the cable companies' backs and stop pressing the FCC to make indecency regulations apply to paid-access channels.
According to McSlarrow, Comcast and Time-Warner, the nation's top two cable operators, will start offering "family choice" tiers in spring 2006, and several other operators are expected to do so as well. However, the tiers will be available only on digital cable systems, not analog – but with the congressional mandate for all broadcasters to go digital by 2007, that caveat should not be considered much of a problem. In fact, there is talk in Congress about providing funding to equip low-income families with digital converters so they won't be forced to replace their existing non-digital TVs.
The tier approach is calculated to stave off calls for "a la carte" program offerings, where subscribers would be able to choose just which channels they receive and which they will not – a situation that most cable executives have dismissed, saying such a model would drive up costs and lead to the demise of channels that can't attract enough advertising dollars.
McSlarrow testified at the indecency hearing that several current channels survive only because they are part of larger packages.
"The reason we have all these cartoon networks, the reason we have the family networks, is because the cable industry invented diversity of programming," McSlarrow said, "and the reason those networks survive is because they are bundled together, allowing them an opportunity to be offered, to gain new subscribers and new viewerships so they can survive and thrive."
Stevens was quick to praise the move. Even at his indecency hearings, he had remarked that it would be up to the public to decide whether a revamped rating system, as has been planned, or tiering plus the new ratings will be sufficient to quell congressional action, but he said that he believed it would be.
At the hearings, Stevens noted that there are currently four indecency-related bills before his committee, at least two of which call for boosting indecency fines to more than $325,000 per incident and for greater enforcement of FCC decency standards, but Stevens said he didn't see any of them going forward. "As far as I'm concerned, none of them have enough support for us to move as long as this process works," he said.
But while L. Brent Bozell III, head of the Parents Television Council (PTC), announced in a letter to Stevens and Commerce Committee co-chair Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hi.) that he would support exempting cable from FCC decency standards if Congress instituted the increased indecency fines and authorized a la carte choice in programming, other religio-reactionaries have withheld their support for tiering.
"It's obvious that Stevens' 'hearings' were never intended to be anything more than a bridge to the Hollywood village responsible for creating trash TV programming," said Jan LaRue, chief counsel for Concerned Women for America (CWfA). "Instead of true cable choice, Stevens thinks Americans will be satisfied paying for a family tier with a Jack Valente[sic]-created MPAA rating system that might be fit for the Manson family. And unless the Senate passes a broadcast decency bill that significantly increases fines, as the House has done, the small fines that the FCC is able to impose on violators won't have any deterrent effect on an industry making billions from polluting the public TV and radio airwaves, and American homes and kids."
Another CWfA official made it clear that whatever plan the media owners came up with would be unacceptable to the fundamentalist flock.
"Cable companies that air some of the most graphically immoral material in television history cannot be trusted to turn around and successfully create a family-friendly tier," said Lanier Swann, Director of Government Relations at CWfA. "Parents must ask themselves if they really want the same cable millionaires who produced trash like 'Nip/Tuck,' 'Party at the Palms' and 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy' to define 'family-friendly.'"
"Furthermore, Hollywood often promotes movies as family-friendly when in fact they perpetuate the very themes that undermine the family unit. Themes such as pre-marital sex, infidelity and vulgar conversations run rampant in many so-called 'made for family films.'"
Focus on the Family (FotF) also weighed in, noting that the FCC has yet to levy any indecency fines in 2005, though it admitted that Martin had said in November that that at least 50 of the nearly 200,000 reported incidents (the vast majority generated by PTC's online forms) would receive fines.
"If no action is taken in 2005, it will be the first time since 1993 that no fines were proposed," reported FotF's e-newsletter CitizenLink.
Meanwhile, however, Broadcasting & Cable Magazine reports that the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the public-policy research arm of Congress, "has apparently been busy pondering the legal ramifications of changes to FCC indecency enforcement."
At the request of one or more legislators, CRS has issued one new report and updated another one; the first on the constitutionality of applying the FCC's indecency restrictions to cable and satellite, while the latter discusses the prospects of a challenge to the FCC's ruling that even fleeting use of the word "fuck" is indecent.
The cable report opines that it "seems uncertain whether the court would find that denying minors access to 'indecent' material on cable TV would constitute a compelling governmental interest," while the study of the use of vulgarities quotes several arguments that the "proliferation of cable channels has rendered archaic Pacifica's denial of full First Amendment rights to broadcast media."
In other words, cable/satellite programming is now so pervasive that, as one speaker at Stevens' indecency hearings pointed out, it constitutes about 85% of all programming watched, with broadcast limited to about 15%. Hence, the FCC's decency standards don't apply to the vast majority of programming that the public watches – and part of the justification for the Pacifica decision, which outlawed George Carlin's "Seven Dirty Words" routine, was that the broadcast spectrum was so limited – and it was, in the 1960s when Pacifica was decided – that "indecent" words could be banned because the radio-listening and television-viewing public didn't have enough places to go to get away from such programming.
Stevens has scheduled a further hearing on media indecency for Jan. 19, though with the cable operators' cave-in, it's unclear whether that hearings will actually be held. In the meantime, both broadcast media owners and cable operators, clearly worried about possible congressional action, will be scurrying to come up with new proposals they hope will fly with the pro-censorship crowd – so as far as free speech is concerned, it will be, to steal a line from Bozell's Nov. 29 testimony, a "race to the bottom."
