'Howl' too hot to hear / 50 years after poem ruled not obscene, radio fears to air it: "Fifty years ago today, a San Francisco Municipal Court judge ruled that Allen Ginsberg's Beat-era poem 'Howl' was not obscene. Yet today, a New York public broadcasting station decided not to air the poem, fearing that the Federal Communications Commission will find it indecent and crush the network with crippling fines.
Free-speech advocates see tremendous irony in how Ginsberg's epic poem - which lambastes the consumerism and conformism of the 1950s and heralds a budding American counterculture - is, half a century later, chilled by a federal government crackdown on the broadcasting of provocative language."
5 comments:
so these people ever see what's on the cable TV?
The problem (or at least some people like the Parents Television Council would call it a problem) is that the FCC has no control over cable TV. They do however have control over broadcast media - anything that goes over the public airwaves and doesn't require special equipment to receive beyond an ordinary TV or Radio. And the FCC has, since Janet Jackson's nipple and the appointment of Kevin Martin as Chairman made decisions that have overturned previous Commission decisions and even court decisions. This combined with a less than clear definition of obscenity from the FCC and a recent ten fold increase in the size of the fine that the Commission can levy has caused a climate of fear amongst broadcasters, seen recently when a number of PBS stations refused to air Ken Burns' The War without the removal of four words from the documentary - not four words repeated numerous time just four words. (The words in question are the the full versions of FUBAR and SNAFU, a**hole, and s**t.)
There's a certain absurdity here but it is a real threat. A PBS station in California was fined over $10,000 by the FCC for airing Martin Scorcese's The Blues uncensored. The FCC received one complaint about that show.
And, I remain convinced, they chose to attack KCSM in San Mateo, CA, because it is both the third or fourth-most-watched of five public stations in the SF Bay area (after KQED, and on a par with KTEH and KRCB, and probably ahead of independent public station KMTP) and because it belongs to the College of San Mateo...in other words, because it has a relatively small endowment (if they had to, WGBH in Boston could pay for the reanimation of Johnnie Cochran and/or Clarence Darrow) and it was presumed to be mired in bureaucracy in a way an independent PBS station would not be. In other words, Bastards of the FCC. I'll note that they also chose to pick on, among the big nets, the most corporately independent/unmeshed with the Military/Industrial Complex, CBS (not by much, but the most of the big commercial nets).
how did a bunch of lyiing government parasites ever get ahold of the electromagnetic spectrum."
The Radio Act of 1927. The Federal Radio Commission was created under the act to bring order out of the chaos that was broadcasting up to that time by assigning frequencies and the power to ban "obscene, indecent, or profane language." The airwaves belong to the public and thus need to be regulated
how can a discovery made by a clever individual belong to the idiot public?
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