Former FCC Commissioners Weigh In On Profanity Issue

Former Federal Communications Commission members Newton Minow, Mark Fowler, and James Quello have filed a brief with the Second Circuit arguing that the FCC is chilling speech, effectively turning over indecency monitoring to the Parents Television council, and that the entire indecency enforcement regime should be rethought in a world where broadcasting is hardly uniquely pervasive. While they said that they had "some sympathy" for the FCC's content concerns, they appeared to have no sympathy for its method of addressing them. "[T]he FCC's enforcement policies have destroyed any expectations some of us had for moderation and restraint in this endeavor," they said, "and caused us to rethink our earlier involvement in this censorial regime." Having done that re-thinking, the petitioners say that not just the FCC's crackdown on fleeting expletives to other recent enforcement actions."Invalidating the fleeting expletive policy alone would only slightly raise the temperature of the chill on broadcast speech," they told the court. "Broadcasters would gain some protection against the occasional 'oops' moment on live broadcasts, but the Commission still would be free to roam the landscape of broadcast programming in search of indefinable words and images that it deems "indecent" - pitting its "artistic judgment" against that of broadcast programmers." They also want the court to consider the continued disparate treatment of broadcast media vs. pay media like cable and satellite. "If such special treatment was ever justified because of the unique influence or pervasiveness of broadcasting, changes in the electronic media environment have made it no longer even remotely credible." Parents Television Council President Tim Winter responded saying that their brief was not accurate. The former chairmen had said that the FCC had abandoned its former, more restrained policy toward indecent speech. But PTC said that the difference was that there was only one "F word" on broadcast TV in 1998, for example, while it appeared "no less than 1,147 times on 184 different programs in 2007."