The American Taliban wants to pull the plug on your cable TV

The new head of the FCC is not my friend. Or yours. That’s the only conclusion I can draw from this New York Times story, published today [emphasis added]:

Leading lawmakers and the new leader of the F.C.C. have proposed a broad expansion of indecency rules, which were significantly toughened just last year. They are also looking for significant increases in the size of fines and new procedures that could jeopardize the licenses of stations that repeatedly violate the rules.

Some senior lawmakers, including Senator Ted Stevens, the Alaskan Republican who is the leader of the Commerce Committee, as well as Kevin J. Martin, the new chairman of the commission, have suggested it may be time to extend the indecency and profanity rules to cable and satellite television providers, which now account for viewership in 85 percent of the nation’s homes. And organizations opposing what they consider indecent programming have joined forces with consumer groups that have been trying to tighten regulation over the cable industry and force it to offer consumers less expensive packages of fewer stations, known as a la carte services.

Let’s be crystal-clear what’s going on here. This is the work of a fanatic named L. Brent Bozell, who hires an army of people to sit around all day watching television and cataloguing all the naughty bits they see. Bozell’s team then posts those naughty bits on his Web site alongside a complaint form. His legions of flying monkeys then send robo-complaints by the millions to the FCC over shows they never watched. Before Bozell’s organization existed, the FCC received a few hundred complaints a year. Today, his group is responsible for 99.8% of all “indecency” complaints. Media Week reported on December 6, 2004:

In an appearance before Congress in February … Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael Powell laid some startling statistics on U.S. senators.

The number of indecency complaints had soared dramatically to more than 240,000 in the previous year, Powell said. The figure was up from roughly 14,000 in 2002, and from fewer than 350 in each of the two previous years. There was, Powell said, “a dramatic rise in public concern and outrage about what is being broadcast into their homes.”

What Powell did not reveal — apparently because he was unaware — was the source of the complaints. According to a new FCC estimate obtained by Mediaweek, nearly all indecency complaints in 2003—99.8 percent—were filed by [Brent Bozell’s] the Parents Television Council, an activist group.

Bozell is also founder of a group called the Media Research Center, one of the leading forces in trying to tear down the independent press in this country.

This is a dramatic overreach by the self-appointed mullahs who want to tell us what to think. Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, told Salon earlier this month: “Religious and conservative groups campaigned for the elevation of Mr. Martin. They have succeeded in establishing a new ‘litmus’ test for the FCC chair –someone who will be at the forefront of monitoring programming.”

None of this stuff is very complicated. If you don’t want cable coming into your home, don’t subscribe. If you think the airwaves are filled with filth, turn off your TV, or throw it away. If you want to block particular channels, block them. It’s very easy. But don’t tell me what I can or can’t watch in the privacy of my own home.

And you know what? Americans overwhelmingly feel the way I do. This is not a grass-roots movement on behalf of the American people. It is a concerted campaign by a small number of fanatics who would prefer to rip up the Bill of Rights and replace it with a Code of Conduct.