Prepare yourselves to be shocked. Are you ready for this? Apparently Parents Television Council, the American Family Association, and their thousands of deputies in the self-appointed moral police are completely full of crap. It’s bad enough that they’ve taken it upon themselves to decide what you and I should and shouldn’t be allowed to watch (and hiding their crusades behind “the children”), but they aren’t even watching the damn shows they’re complaining about :
Virtually none of those who complained to the Federal Communications Commission about the teen drama Without A Trace actually saw the episode in question, CBS affiliates said as they asked the agency to rescind its proposed record indecency fine of $3.3 million.
All of the 4,211 e-mailed complaints came from Web sites operated by the Parents Television Council and the American Family Association, the stations said in a filing on Monday.
In only two of the emails did those complaining say they had watched the program, and those two apparently refer to a “brief, out-of-context segment†of the episode that was posted on the Parents Television Council’s Web site, the affiliates’ filing said.
“There were no true complainants from actual viewers,†the stations said. To be valid, complaints must come from an actual viewer in the service area of the station at issue, the filing said.
“The e-mails were submitted … because advocacy groups hoping to influence television content generally exhorted them to contact the commission,†the CBS stations said.
These lying crybabies, who are apparently too stupid to use their V-chips, are but a very tiny minority compared to the millions who watched the broadcast :
About 8.2 million people saw the Dec. 31, 2004 broadcast, which was a repeat of an earlier airing of the same episode that drew no indecency complaints. E-mails about the episode began arriving at the FCC on Jan. 12, the same day the PTC sent an alert to its members, the CBS stations said.
The FCC in proposing the fines of $32,500 upon each of 103 CBS stations said they had “broadcast material graphically depicting teenage boys and girls participating in a sexual orgy.â€
Even if we took the 4211 complaints at face value, that’s still only 0.05% of the viewing audience for a show being responsible for more than $3.3 million dollars in fines. Predictably, PTC president Brent Bozell is wrapping his wrapping his little witchhunt in a patriotic package :
“Every complaint filed comes from a United States citizen who, last I heard, had the constitutional privilege to petition his government,†Bozell said. “Rather than these stupid legal maneuvers, CBS and Viacom should spend time pondering why it’s wrong to broadcast scenes of teen orgies in front of millions of children.â€
Ahhh…it’s nice to see a patriot like Bozell defend our democracy by exercising his “constitutional privilege to petition his government”. Inspired by his bravery, perhaps we can use our first amendment right to email Brent and tell him that if he doesn’t like something on television he should change the fucking channel.