directorcommentary | jasonbentley.org

Chelsea Handler!

Yeah, I know you're reading this, you alleged "commedienne." Look, if you're gonna sit around on VH-1 and talk shit about what people are wearing and fuckin' get paid, seek to betray your hair color and learn how to pronounce the names of the subjects of your shade. Girl, you don't call Björk "buh-zhork" on television and not expect those of us with the program to bitch slap your bony ass from here to Scandal-navia. Hel-lo! It's "byerk." Fuckin' Dan Rather knows that.

I'm out.

This blog is now officially protected (as such) by a Creative Commons license. Parts of my website have been licensed for a while now, but I'm going through everything to make sure it's done and official.

If you're unfamiliar with Creative Commons (CC), it's a brilliant method of extending selective copyright over creative work published online or anywhere. Taking its cue from the GNU public license, Creative Commons is far more flexible and extendable than its predecessor, and could point the way toward a reasonable exchange of knowledge and creative material in the future. CC has become increasingly popular, and may one day soon reach a critical mass.

Many sites, including the unstoppable Wikipedia, openly use and advocate CC. The nonprofit team at www.creativecommons.org have made it incredibly easy to select, enable, and publish these licenses. If you have a website and publish creative content, there's no reason to not protect yourself. Call it Creative Commonsense. :-)

This blog, for example, is licensed under the Attribution - Noncommercial - Share Alike license. This you can copy, distribute, display, and perform the content of this blog, and make derivative works based on it, provided I get credit, the work is not commercial, and any deriviative work is shared with this same license. So, another non-profit blogger could use my XML feed to publish my headlines and summaries on their site, but, say, Time magazine couldn't use one of my entries as a column, for example, without contacting me, paying me, and sending me a signed photo of Aaron Brown.

There's even a Firefox plug-in called mozcc that automatically displays the CC status of any licensed page. For example, when I visit my blog page, this shows up on the status bar:


So very cool. Now ya know.

I'm presenting this article as a follow up to the previous entry ("I read the news today, old boy"). It appeared in the Seattle Times on November 22, 2004.

Dirty shame: FCC's real intentions are showing
by Kay McFadden

They saw that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves to cover themselves.

And it wasn't pretty.

Since Nov. 2, the battle over indecency on the airwaves has been elevated to a level that suggests the issue was more than election-year pandering. The emphasis on values that helped re-elect President Bush is, to some, endorsement for a crusade that may eclipse the one against terrorism in Iraq.

But so far, what's most immoral is the spectacle of politicians and special-interest groups trying to hide all the contradictions inherent in deciding what's too dirty for America and using it as a distraction to cover the bigger threat of media consolidation.

Last week, the National Football League dropped a yellow flag on ABC for the network's "Monday Night Football" pre-game promotion featuring "Desperate Housewives" star Nicollette Sheridan.

In the decidedly tongue-in-cheek promo, Sheridan pretends to seduce Philadelphia Eagles star Terrell Owens. When Owens resists, she drops her towel and throws herself at him. He decides to skip the game.

Although none of it was graphic, the implication to the NFL was unmistakable: Women cannot be seen interfering with the playing of sports.

OK, just kidding.

"ABC's opening was inappropriate and unsuitable for our 'Monday Night Football' audience," said the NFL's formal statement. "While ABC may have gained attention for one of its other shows, the NFL and its fans lost."

Actually, the fans didn't lose that much. They've still got semi-clad cheerleaders on the sidelines and ads with women wrestling for beers, not to mention that family-friendly amusement, "Guess Which Bad Word Mr. Coach Is Yelling."

In a CNBC interview, FCC Chairman Michael Powell took the tone of a scolding parent, saying he was disappointed in ABC and "I wonder if Walt Disney would be proud."

It seems presumptuous to say what Uncle Walt would feel. He drew animals that wore jackets but not pants. He may have appreciated the Disney profits boosted by "Desperate Housewives," which viewers made No. 2 in the latest Nielsen ratings.

The same week the NFL forced ABC to eat dirt at the line of scrimmage, a local TV station in Cleveland launched its own sweeps-promo experiment in human nature.

WOIO-TV aired an 11 p.m. newscast that included a story about a performance artist whose installation features the naked bodies of thousands of Ohioans.

And WOIO anchor Sharon Reed covered the story by getting uncovered, as in totally nude. Now, that's a first person-story. (It was legal because current FCC rules allow post-10 p.m. broadcasts of so-called indecent material.)

Need we add the newscast went over well? To quote trade-industry magazine Broadcasting & Cable, "Buff Broadcast Breaks Record."

As if efforts to craft a nationalized clampdown on indecency and obscenity aren't hampered enough by our diversity, even conservative watchdogs have trouble agreeing.

ABC's Veterans Day broadcast of "Saving Private Ryan" was dropped by nearly 50 affiliate stations afraid of getting FCC fines because of the movie's language and violence. (We apparently did not storm Normandy with "Please" and "Thank you.")

The powerful Parents Television Council, which led the outcry against Janet Jackson's Super Bowl breast and backed whopping FCC fines against CBS-owned stations and parent Viacom, gave the OK to "Saving Private Ryan."

After it aired, however, the less powerful and more right-wing American Family Association filed a complaint with the FCC condemning the film's unedited broadcast.

In the same contested vein, faith-based groups have condemned forcing the cable industry to offer à la carte channels - i.e., the choice of individual channels rather than the current, obligatory package deal.

The Faith and Family Coalition supported an FCC finding that "smaller and specialty programmers, such as religious programmers" would lose out in the marketplace.

Yet the PTC just issued a report supporting à la carte because it would enable the unbundling of mature-content channels and therefore protect kids from obscene content, or at least force them to watch it at their friends' houses during sleepovers.

Clearly, nothing is clear about moral values, even among the Red States. That's why local taste remains the best determinant of what's tolerable.

Strangely enough, there is one issue on which both Red and Blue States agree: The treacherous effect of media consolidation.

While the FCC has turned activist regarding indecency, the agency hasn't been nearly as aggressive in protecting our range of selections.

Earlier this year, a federal court halted the enactment of FCC rules that would have raised the cap on single ownership of TV stations from 39 to 45 percent of the nation's stations, and eliminated the ban on owning a newspaper and station in the same market.

The FCC was ordered to rewrite the rules. As yet, though, it hasn't revealed its master plan for a process that this time should be wide open to public input.

The concern over indecency and obscenity on the air is valid. TV's increasingly coarse attitude toward sex and language has had a palpable effect on private behavior.

Let's just hope it doesn't become a fig leaf for the FCC's semi-secret pursuit of an agenda that would shrink our choices - to safeguard not children, but the large media conglomerates that pour money into congressional and White House coffers.

I find it interesting that, with sanctimonious anti-UN House Representatives calling for Kofi Annan's resignation over his son's oil-for-food program profiteering, nobody attacks Colin Powell because his son, FCC Chairman Michael Powell's, continued insistence on wiping his copious ass with the Bill of Rights. Or if not for wiping his ass, then at least for setting up an environment of fear and loathing conducive to egregious Constitutional asswipery.

I'm not sure why any Republican with ties to the Bush cabal would want to start pressing resignations over profiteering in Iraq. That would seem from this angle to be a very slippery slope. Maybe that's why the RNC is sloghing this off on the junior senator from Minnesota, Norm Colman, the same tool that publicly applauded intimidation tactics to keep women away from safe, legal abortions clinics. With a 100% rating from the NRA and the Christian Coalition, a 45% rating from the NEA, 21% from the LCV, and 0% ratings from NARAL, the AFL-CIO, APHA, and ARA - it's plain to see where this sacrificial lamb's social concience lies.

Click here to check out how quickly a message is sent to the FCC "Commissioners" when it appears to be authored by the Republoviator himself, Bill O'Reilly, and sent from the Parents Television Council (PTC), a "family values" website decided to saving good, Christian parents from the responsibility of good, Christian parenting. How ironic that Bush trumpets personal responsibility and accountability and rails against big, intrusive government - and yet the PTC proudly wails, "Help us make the FCC do its job...because our children are watching!"

Well, then, who's watching your children?

Apparently, they want the Government to do it and they're willing to go to great lengths further their agenda. The PTC sends out questionnaires to "constituents," filled with vague and loaded questions and then uses the statistics derived from them as proof that television stations don't serve the public interest and therefore do not fall under the protections of the United States Constitution and the FCC charter. One such press release, "Texans Fed Up With Violence, Sex, and Foul Language on Television," features this question:

Recently a program aired at 8 p.m. that included a prostitute being paid to perform a sex act with a horse. Is this type of material appropriate for broadcast television?

No mention of what program, the outlet, the type of programming, or the context. Was it a surly episode of C.S.I. or a "hard" news exposé? Dunno. They're not saying.

The PTC says that the First Amendment does not protect "obscene material" (one can assume this also applies to books, magazines, and other things your children can see from the SUV):

1. An average person, applying contemporary community standards, must find that the material, as a whole, appeals to the prurient (arousing lustful feelings) interest;

2. The material must depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable law; and

3. The material, taken as a whole, must lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

"Arousing lustful feelings?" Oh, come on. One can imagine this language was drafted around the same time they adapted the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" to include the line "We'll hang John Scopes from a sour apple tree."

Oh, by the way, these arbiters of taste recommends you take your family to see Christmas with the Kranks.

"Christmas with the Kranks" is full of laughs, sight gags and typical Tim Allen sarcastic humor. Some bits are predictable but the cast and writing makes for an enjoyable holiday romp. Tim Allen has one scene with Jamie Lee Curtis where he has had Botox injections done and the numbness makes it impossible to eat. This sight gag, alone, will have you rolling in the aisles with sidesplitting laughter. And Dan Aykroyd gives us a bit of a Blues Brothers' Christmas as he breaks out an accordion and sings some holiday tunes.

Sophomoric writing aside, are we to blieve that Botox injections are not only wholesome, but worthy of "rolling in the aisles with sidesplitting laughter?" Wait...a Blues Brothers Christmas...with an accordion? Who the fuck are this people? When did Aykroyd and Belushi's coke-addled speedballin' legacy become...cute? And when did it ever involve an accordion?

Hmmm...why is Botox, and for that matter Viagra, Levitra, and Cialis ads acceptable to these people and not the image of a white woman and black man together (see recent Superbowl flap)? Don't those "devil horn" Viagra ads appeal to the prurient interest? Sure, but the Pharmaceutical industry lobby pays out a helluva lot more than the Fort Worth faith-based bake-sale crowd.

I'll conclude with this, another poster from the "good ol' days" of World War II:


Hitler hated "degenerate art" too. Hmmm...the poster above is stirring up some lustful feelings...perhaps a lust for freedom? A lust for life?

Clearly prurient. So, for the Parents Television Council and Adolf Hitler, I offer the following non-degenerate, non-lustful art by which your children's purity is guranteed (your husband might find the fruit voluptuous, however):