The One-Handed Economist

The NYT reports on efforts by FCC Chair and Superdouche, Kevin J Martin, to persuade Congress that his regulatory agency needs even broader authority to regulate television content.

No longer content to dole-out bandwidth like a Dickensian gruel-meister and prosecute broadcast networks for daring to expose children to the horrors of the occasional breast, the FCC wishes authority to control content of television for which people choose to pay. Why would Martin and his minions want to do such a thing?

For the children, of course.

And, like all such cases, invocation of The Children is meant to deflect any possible criticism, and to distract from the issue at hand. From the article:

“Clearly, steps should be taken to protect children from excessively violent programming,” said Kevin J. Martin, the agency’s chairman and a longtime proponent of à la carte programming. “Some might say such action is long overdue. Parents need more tools to protect children from excessively violent programming.”

{snip}

[An FCC Report] said that the V-chip and other blocking technology had failed because, according to recent studies, nearly 9 out of 10 parents do not use them And the ratings system was of limited use, the study found, because less than half of parents surveyed had used it.

And such is the kind of thinking involved: ratings and V-chips have been required a decade, but because parents aren’t using them despite every effort to encourage them to do so, therefore we must be granted power to regulate content for them. It makes perfect sense, if you happen to think everyone should conform to your standards of propriety. The most tortuously illogical statement comes from the penultimate paragraph:

But Mr. Martin rejected that argument, noting that the industry has already formulated ratings to describe the level of violence in programs, and therefore government-imposed limits on when programs could run would be constitutional.

Let’s review: The industry has already formulated a ratings system, essentially at gun point, and therefore there’s no Constitutional issue with the government censoring programming. Brilliant! Cable TV is a completely voluntary service, and as such the government has no business telling anyone what may or may not be shown on it. Furthermore, once the FCC has power to regulate cable they’ll be back in a short while to request the power to regulate satellite TV, and soon enough they’ll be asserting authority over the internet. Once any control over what we hear, see, and read is given to the government, it’s only a matter of time before they demand absolute control as their original mission expands and political concerns trump considerations of what is right, proper, or just.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Tilting At Windmills, VITRIOL, Media, National, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.