SCOTT ALLEN MILLER
FCC sows confusion in 'holy war' on profanityTHE FEDERAL Communications Commission has declared a jihad against blue broadcasters. If the FCC's commissioners were sincere in their desire to make the public airwaves less vulgar, they would issue clear, precise, detailed indecency rules to radio and television stations, then duly enforce them. In spite of all the bluster and the millions of dollars in fines being handed down, the FCC still refuses to tell broadcasters like myself what (if anything) we need to do to avoid the wrath of the FCC's "holy war."
"You do not want the government to write a red book of what you can say and not say," the FCC chairman, Michael Powell, recently said at a meeting of the National Association of Broadcasters. Powell claimed that the ambiguity of its indecency rules gives the FCC the flexibility to consider the context of a questionable utterance. This is absurd. If Governor Mitt Romney announced a crackdown on speeding, then eliminated all speed limits so police officers wouldn't ticket fathers rushing their expectant wives to hospital delivery rooms, the result would be chaos on the roads. So it is in broadcasting where confusion, caution, and uncertainty now govern. The demand for change is itself dubious. The general public is not demanding a crackdown on broadcast indecency. Of the estimated 9 million viewers who witnessed Janet Jackson's judgment malfunction at last February's Super Bowl, about 531,000 people -- less than 1 percent of the audience -- complained to the FCC. On the other hand, increased viewership of satellite and cable television, whose content is largely unregulated by the FCC, proves that most Americans are not pining for the days when only "wholesome" programming was on the idiot box. Another myth is that the FCC is getting tough on all indecent broadcasters. Historically, the FCC has tended to levy indecency fines much more aggressively against radio than television, and this bias has continued after the Super Bowl. Heavy fines against radio stations have made big headlines recently, but the FCC's refusal to fine NBC for airing an obscenity, even though the utterance was declared indecent, received much less attention. The double standard is tactical. It plays to the snobbery some newsroom editors and pundits already display towards radio while avoiding a possible backlash against the FCC on the evening news. The FCC's crackdown is against all broadcasters, not just a few famous "shock jocks." The vast majority of us would obey the FCC's guidelines if we only knew what they were. With only a few contradictory FCC precedents but no official rules to go by, responsible radio station programmers have to guess about what is merely risque and what is truly risky. Meanwhile, careers and radio stations themselves hang in the balance.
"Everyone is going to err on the side of caution," Jeff Smulyan, chairman and CEO of For example, the late talk show host Jerry Williams could not conduct his annual sex survey on WRKO now. Music radio stations across the country are dropping or chopping up some of your favorite songs by The Who, OutKast, Sheryl Crow, the Rolling Stones, Lou Reed, Guns 'n' Roses, Elton John, Pearl Jam, John Mellencamp, and others. While we may successfully escape the FCC's scimitars, responsible broadcasters are not serving the public at large if we continue to reduce everything we do to children's programming. The FCC has created an artificial mandate for a war without end against an undefined problem. Any casual student of government sees history in the process of repeating itself: The bureaucracy invents or exaggerates a problem, demands power and funding to solve it, then achieves only enough success to demand even more power and funding. Even those demanding that America's airwaves be cleaned up should recognize the warning signs that the FCC's jihad against indecency is really another Washington power grab at the taxpayer's expense.
Scott Allen Miller is a talk radio host on 680 AM WRKO. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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