Busy Body Television Council

An interesting story today from the folks at Ars Technica about FCC complaints. The number of FCC complaints about television programming has sky rocketed in the past few years. In 2000 the number of complaints was 350, and by 2003, there were 240,000 complaints for the year. Apparently over 95% of these complaints were by a group called Parents Television Council, who claim to "promote and restore responsibility and decency to the entertainment industry." Their website has a list of their various campaigns and agendas to keep the bored soccer moms and dads incensed about lewdness of MTV, the threat of Grand Theft Auto, and the general villany of violence, boobies, and bad words. They do acknowledge that the primary responsibility to make sure children don't see improper shows depends on the parents. However they find it their responsibility to flood the FCC with hundreds of thousands of form letters for the latest tragedy to come on television.

The form letter flooding is nothing new. Places like moveon.org have been doing it for a few years now, and there's even a site called Capitol Advantage to get your fringe interest group up and running with a bevy of form letters for your cause. The PTC is probably more of a nuisance than anything else. However it doesn't preclude the possibility that their efforts have been supplemented or even totally generated by a script that automatically submits these form letters en masse every time two idiots on MTV talk about a dirty book during the latest episode of "Real World".

As I have stated before, the FCC only pays attention when complaints are filed about specific shows and improper content. So how can someone counter the efforts of PTC? I give kudos to the FCC, they've gotten so many of these form letters that if they get 10,000 copies of the same form letter, they now just count it as 1 set of complaints. Of course, that has bent our PTC friends out of shape. If they get their way, they'll have each letter counted individually, and we'll be back to square one. What would you do then? That's easy, spend a few bucks, set up your own form letter to submit complaints to the FCC. Then print them up, and mail them to our buddies at the FCC.

What would be a better way to create a complaint system for the FCC? Well, that's a tricky question, any possible way leaves itself open for abuse of some type. However I think that some sort of system that required individually identifible credentials for the complaintant would be necessary. A phone number perhaps when you call a complaint line. It can ask you a series of questions, you answer each question and hit pound to enter the next bit of information. Sure it's inconvenient, but if you're really and truly offended by something on television it wouldn't seem to be a problem.

Or maybe giving little Johnnie a book to read instead of free range on the television to watch all the violent movies and porn he wants would be a better answer.