Simple Minded Regional Prejudices in a Supreme Court Opinion
Today the Supreme Court released its opinion (pdf) in FCC v. Fox Television Studios. The case concerns the FCC’s change in 2004 to enforce a ban on even single uses of profanity on the air. More background on the case is here. The opinion contains this amazing quote (page 24) provided by Justice Scalia:
We doubt, to begin with, that small-town broadcasters run a heightened risk of liability for indecent utterances. In programming that they originate, their down-home local guests probably employ vulgarity less than big-city folks; and small-town stations generally cannot afford or cannot attract foul-mouthed glitteratae from Hollywood.
This is a basic culture war salvo of the sort you might find from Rush Limbaugh or a random right wing blogger. And there it is, in a Supreme Court opinion, provided by the Harvard educated judge from New York city, with no citations to outside sources or to facts in the record of the case.
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Pingback by Posts about Rush Limbaugh as of April 28, 2009 » The Daily Parr — April 28, 2009 @ 7:33 pm
And he’s incredibly uninformed about the broadcasting ownership structure in the country he adjudicates over, to boot….
“Small town broadcasters” are the least likey originators of “local” programming, or any programming for that matter. Non-metropolitan-sited broadcast stations retransmit the vast majority of their content, scraping up their own local content only enough to comply with FCC local content rules (if that – check the geographic distribution of FCC enforcement actions over local content violations). Contrary to the implication of the opinion, perhaps that’s because those stations are the least likely to be locally owned. You’re more likely to see “local” content in Bethesda, MD than in Greenville, SC, in Seattle, WA than in Cheyenne, WY.
Catch a clue, dude…
Comment by heh — April 30, 2009 @ 11:08 am