Until recently, broadcasters
who breached the federal government’s indecency standards risked incurring not
only the wrath of some viewers but also fines of up to $32,500.
No longer.
Now, any “obscene, profane,
or indecent” content that the Federal Communications Commission finds “patently
offensive” can earn the station’s owner fines of up to $325,000: 10 times the
previous maximum.
The changes come courtesy of
the new Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which President Bush signed into law
last week. Commenting on the former maximum, the president had this to say:
“For some broadcasters, this
amount is meaningless. It’s relatively painless for them when they violate
decency standards.”
And perhaps he’s right. For some broadcasters.
For others though, the old
$32,500 fine was anything but painless, and the new one could be a death blow.
Washington Post television columnist Lisa de Moraes summed it up with this
headline: “A Wardrobe Malfunction and
You’ll Lose Your Shirt, So to Speak.”
Among the habitually
cash-strapped broadcasters eyeing the new law with trepidation: public
television and radio stations.
“There’s a great deal of
concern about this among public broadcasters,” says Norm Silverstein, president
and CEO of Rochester’s WXXI.
For commercial broadcasters,
fines often come from entertainment content: witness Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe
malfunction” or, more recently, a “Without a Trace” episode that depicted teenagers
taking part in an orgy.
Obviously that’s not your
average PBS fare. For public broadcasters, the potential problems come from
their journalistic programming.
“We can be fined for content
in a documentary,” says Silverstein. “To be fined for broadcasting a documentary
— it’s unfortunate that we’re spending our time on these issues, particularly
with the amount of violence on some of those cable shows.”
Silverstein notes that the
indecency penalties don’t apply at all to cable programs, which aren’t
broadcast over the airwaves, hence aren’t regulated by the FCC. Similarly, the
radio world has satellite radio, which is just as unregulated. That’s why
Howard Stern can be raunchier these days, yet not get fined.
Opponents say the heavy
fines could have a chilling effect on stations, and Silverstein says that’s
already beginning to happen to some degree. When his station rebroadcast the Martin
Scorsese documentary on Bob Dylan recently, it bleeped some the language. WXXI hadn’t
done that the first time it televised the show.
“The FCC is very unclear
about the standards,” says Silverstein. “It makes it worse.” And to further
compound matters, literally, says Silverstein, “You could be fined multiple
times for each broadcast.”
Still, Silverstein says his
stations are willing to take risks, if necessary.
“We’re not going to run and
hide if there’s an important story to be told,” he says. “We take a lot of
risks here and let the viewers decide.”
In another part of the
market, these changes aren’t likely to be felt quite as acutely.
According to Brother Wease,
WCMF’s morning host, his company has long since toned down its content.
“It’s a meaningless change
to me, because I’ve already been following the rules,” he says. Plus, he adds,
“I can still say what I want politically.”
But Wease acknowledges that the
steep hike in fines could prove a dangerous threat for smaller, independently
operated stations.
“If somebody got popped on
one of those stations, it could put them out of business,” he says.
Does he think that will
happen? “I hope not,” Wease says. “I’d hate to see someone who put his life
into a station lose it because he hired an idiot. Because that’s what it’d be.”
After a moment’s reflection,
he adds: “It feels pretty silly to be censored as an adult.”
Not everyone being censored is an adult. At WBER, operated by Monroe One BOCES,
high school DJs are an important part of the mix. The station has an
educational license, which is stricter than other licenses anyway, says station
manager and program director Joey Giusto. Like Wease, Giusto says the
additional fines won’t make a great difference, since the station’s vision of itself
has already led to stricter standards.
“Even if there was no law at
all and there was no penalty or anything I’d still think of the station,” he
says. “We’re always going to be on the cautious side with what we play.”
That said, he admits to
worrying about what could happen.
“No one song is going to
make or break a station,” he says, but “the [regulatory] climate is just a lot
different these days.”
If the new laws were
enforced to the fullest, one inexperienced or immature student could cause
significant problems for the station.
“We try and train all the high
school DJs, so they’re aware of all the rules and what you can and can’t say,
and we try to monitor them on the air but they’re kind of the weakest link in
the chain,” says Giusto. Without much experience, it’s easier to mistakenly
play an unsanitized track (or slip up on-air, for that matter).
If that happens, Giusto
says, he hopes the FCC will take mitigating circumstances into account.
“There’s a lot of difference
between something that’s done blatantly and something that’s one mistake,” he
says.
The goal of all this, of
course, is to use the harsher penalties to sanitize television and radio to a
point where it becomes safe for the wariest of parents to watch or listen with
their kids, without fear of encountering anything untoward.
“I don’t think it’ll have
that effect,” says Norm Silverstein.
And even if it did, would
that address the core moral issues that prompted this debate in the first
place?
Wease doesn’t think so: “What
you teach a kid about right and wrong is more important than an f-word.”
This article appears in Jun 21-27, 2006.
