I'm also a complete idiot and I VOTE TOO!
I was listening to WMMR this evening. For those who don't know, in the evenings it's now Dee Snyder Radio, hosted by Mr. Snyder himself. He took a call from a listener who was upset that words like whore and crap were edited out of songs that had played. Of course it's entirely too appropriate for Dee Snyder to be having this conversation, but I digress.
The gist of the conversation that recent FCC crackdowns have the radio stations afraid of their own shadows. Mr. Snyder commented that the FCC is way overboard and needs to be reigned in.
This is when the caller said, "Man, I hate these damn liberals!"
(I now pause to bow my head and shake it in sad bewilderment.)
2 comments:
What's interesting about this whole FCC thing - is that if you trace the roots of the current FCC issues back - it really DOES stem back to the Clinton Administration. See - back in the 90's, radio ownership was deregulated - which allowed a few companies (like Clear Channel) to buy up a lot of stations (sometimes as many as five in each market) and grow to be monster behemoth companies that wield a lot of power. How does that affect the FCC now?
Well Clear Channel's top guy - Lowry Mays - turns out to be a good ole Texan and buddy of Dubya. Now - it's not as if the Clinton Adminstration knew the Clear Channel was going to be the big gorilla it is now - but the hindsight is that this is what ended up happening, and now we have Clear Channel pandering to Bush administration - trying to look like the good guys with a "zero tolerance" policy on indecent material - so even if it's the FCC bowing to perceived consumer outrage (due to Ms. Jackson's costume malfunction) Clear Channel is smelling like and will continue to smell like roses while the rest of the companies get the shaft - and the fines. CC did get fined at some point - but it was a smaller fine and probably intended to look politically like there was no favoritism going on.
The FCC is walking a fine line right now. I hear rumblings they are going to go after cable TV and satellite radio. If they do - they'll be overstepping their bounds in a big way.
Oh yeah - did you know the head of the FCC is one Michael Powell. Last name familiar? Yep - it's Colin's son.
--*Rob
Well, I'm pretty much a hard-line anti-FCCer. Regulating communication is completely contrary to the first amendment. As a practical matter, there probably does need to be something detailing who gets to use what frequency on the airwaves in each geographical area, but even that shouldn't necessarily be completely up to the government, and they shouldn't give away (or sell) these airwaves indefinitely. And when it comes to policing content, well, they should butt the fuck out. Thomas Jefferson said so. (He might have meant to write "butt the suck out," but they had a funny way of writing S's back then, so it's tough to tell.)
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