What a gross travesty of governmental oversight. I know the Christian-Taliban in charge of our country have a deep seated animosity towards all things PBS for some reason, but this is still a fucking joke.
Soldiers Words May Test PBS Language Rules :
The coarse language used to discuss the horrors of war may put PBS in the Federal Communications Commission's obscenity sights.The PBS documentarian Ken Burns has been working for six years on “The War,” a soldier’s-eye view of World War II, and those who have seen parts of the 14-plus hours say they are replete with salty language appropriate to discussions of the horrors of war.
Ok, that's bad enough, but what about this:
Most notably, PBS’s deputy counsel, Paul Greco, wrote in a memo to stations, it is no longer enough simply to bleep out offensive words audibly when the camera shows a full view of the speaker’s mouth. From now on, the on-camera speaker’s mouth must also be obscured by a digital masking process, a solution that PBS producers have called cartoonish and clumsy.In addition, profanities expressed in compound words must be audibly bleeped in their entirety so that viewers cannot decipher the words. In the past, PBS required producers to bleep only the offensive part of the compound word.
What a collection of shit-heels! “You can't handle the truth!” So now we have to airbrush history to comply with these hypocritical, cunt-faced monkey fuckers.
Ken Burns
said he was “flabbergasted” that F.C.C. policy was being applied to documentaries, particularly when President Bush himself was inadvertently heard using vulgar language, broadcast on some cable newscasts, at the recent Group of Eight summit meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia.He added that he hoped PBS and public television stations could unite and “stand our ground” in opposing the self-censorship sought by F.C.C. policy, but he noted that “we’ve also experienced as a family the devastating consequences, and it is not something that any station or any executive wants to see repeated.”
In March, the PBS station KCSM in San Mateo, Calif., was fined $15,000 over profanities in “The Blues.” [oh yeah, can't have musicians cursing] That fine is being appealed.
Ms. Sloan said PBS had to institute the policy after successive F.C.C. rulings steadily narrowed what is permissible. Moreover, legislation signed into law last month by President Bush increased by a factor of 10 the fines for broadcast indecency, to $325,000 a station for each instance.
That was “a real deal breaker,” Ms. Sloan said. “For many of our stations, a single fine of that magnitude would put them into bankruptcy.”
Producers are in a difficult position, [Margaret Drain, the vice president for national programs at WGBH in Boston] said. “What we’re trying to do is do our work and bring the same kind of high-quality broadcast programs to the public. We don’t want to overreact, and we don’t want to self-censor.”As for “The War,” Ms. Drain called it “the perfect test case for the F.C.C., because who’s going to take on veterans of this country who put their lives at risk for an honest, just cause?”
“It’s not pornographic; it’s not scatological,” she said. “It’s an emotional expression of a reality they experienced, and it’s part of the historical record.”
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