A fine mess at the FCC
WHEN THE Federal Communications Commission fined CBS $3.6 million -- by far the agency’s biggest penalty ever -- for an episode of “Without A Trace” that featured a teen sex orgy, I immediately became interested in seeing the show.
I had to see $3.6 million worth of offensiveness. Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl nipple, after all, only rated $550,000 of obscenity. This was 6 1/2 nipples’ worth of raunch.
I got CBS to send over a DVD of the episode from Dec. 31, 2004, and immediately put it on. And, to my shock, I was honestly disgusted.
The FCC has a long history of only fining the inanely inoffensive, such as the radio station that in 1988 played the parody song “Walk With an Erection” or the disc jockey who allowed a guest to play the piano with his penis.
Being a member of the FCC must be embarrassing when you have to go in for your kid’s career day. Imagine walking up after a cop talks about cuffing suspected murderers, and you’ve got to tell the third-graders that you’re finally closing in on the piano penis guy.
But if you throw enough darts -- or allow a Christian organization to throw enough darts for you through a mass e-mail campaign -- eventually you’ll hit something offensive. And even though the moral of the “Without a Trace” episode was that kids shouldn’t get involved in teen sex orgies or someone will get murdered by the local sheriff, the slick-looking Jerry Bruckheimer production made the shockingly long, 56-second sex scene look awesome, all blue-lighted and threesome-filled and zit-free. Snoop doesn’t have these kinds of parties. Nothing like this would ever happen to teenagers even if they were attending Hugh Hefner High. There’s even foreplay. You’re really bending the believability of your story in order to titillate when you pretend boys in high school engage in foreplay.
None of this would be upsetting if they were adults. But sexualizing children is creepy. These are the kinds of gutsy positions we Op-Ed columnists are paid to take.
EVEN THOUGH THIS soft-kiddie porn was in awful taste, the FCC should still abandon its fining campaign. It’s a losing battle that will do nothing but exacerbate the end of the broadcast networks by making them safer, more nervous and lamer than cable. And by chasing everyone to cable and satellite radio, the FCC will cease to have any reason for being. The best thing the FCC can do is let the networks air their ridiculously unrealistic plots designed to scare suburban parents and get back to its main business, which I believe is continuously breaking up AT&T;, then putting it back together again.
The FCC’s fight to protect kids from sex is useless because, as inappropriate as that teen sex orgy was, it’s a whole lot tamer than what teens see online. And I don’t know whom the Parents Television Council, which got supporters to e-mail complaint forms, thinks it is helping. Because the only way for anyone to see the offending minute of television, which would have otherwise disappeared, is to click on the council’s website, where the offending scene is posted.
This is a website that is going to save me a lot of time. I’ve already bookmarked it so I can go there on the opening day of “Basic Instinct 2.”
The most archaic part of the ruling, though, is that the $3.6 million is only levied against CBS affiliates in Central and Mountain time zones because they air the last of their prime-time shows at 9 p.m. instead of 10 p.m., so they can wake up early and do their good, honest Central and Mountainy things. Despite going to bed earlier, for some reason 9 is still considered within the nation’s 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. “safe harbor” period for kids.
It makes sense, then, that the FCC -- which rules over things flying free through the airwaves and not by cable, satellite or a printing press -- should only be fining people who get their network stations through rabbit ears. So it’s really 14% of CBS’ New Year’s Eve underage viewers in the Central and Mountain time zones who were affected. And, seriously, if you’re a teenager in Idaho watching “Without a Trace” with the help of rabbit ears on New Year’s Eve, the original air date, I don’t care how enticed you are by the scene, your odds of getting invited to a sex orgy are not all that strong.