Govt. regulation isn’t the answer to public concern about indecen...
Govt. regulation isn’t the answer to public concern about indecent programs, said Sumner Redstone, CBS and Viacom chmn. People who think a show is too explicit will watch something else, and cable viewers can block objectionable content, he told…
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a Media Institute dinner Mon. Time Warner Cable Pres. Glenn Britt used the event to tout parental TV controls. Calling cable, broadcasting and telephone “heavily regulated” industries, he said: “The cable industry has consistently advocated deregulation of all of these industries whenever competition is available as an alternative to regulation.” Redstone said FCC indecency regulations have executives and artists “living with a great deal of fear… A couple thousand form complaints [to the FCC] from people condemning TV shows that they have never watched can result in an indecency fine 10 times higher than it was a year ago.” Such complaints can prompt “regulators to dictate business models that ultimately will do more harm,” Redstone added. FCC indecency fines of more than $3 million in March prompted some stations to pixelate scenes with partial nudity, use tape delays for sporting events and move programming that broadcasters fear could be found indecent to later times, said an attorney involved in indecency litigation. Fox is among the broadcast networks that pixelates the images of speakers’ mouths when they curse, in addition to bleeping the audio, a spokesman said: “That’s a step that we took some time ago.”