Army of Prudes

Via Reason’s Radley Balko, another example of fear of FCC speech regulations–and those interest groups who push for them–keeping entirely reasonable content off the air:

David Harsanyi, whose book on the Nanny State is now in bookstores (as well as excerpted in our November issue), reports that the new Ken Burns joint on World War II will be sanitized so GI’s language won’t offend L. Brent Bozell III and his army of prudes:

Rather than risk a $325,000 fine per word from the FCC — if the offensive words are broadcast between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. – PBS provided two cuts of War and allowed stations to decide which one to air.

Here’s the thing, The FCC allowed the same langauge to be used in a ABC prime-time showing of Steven Speilberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” — a masterful, but fictional, account of WW 2 — a couple of years ago.

As I’ve written elsewhere, broadcast speech codes and the whole "indecency" uproar are almost entirely created by a very small cadre of cranky complainers who ceaselessly pester the FCC into "doing something" about what’s on television. This leads not only to the obvious free-speech issues, but also to pushes for other regulatory approaches like "cable a la carte." And in the meantime, filmmakers like Ken Burns have to make nice with the censors in order to get their work shown.

The whole thing reminds me, in a weird way, of the EU antitrust case against Microsoft. In that case, the EU has (stupidly, and detrimentally) decided that it needs to play software designer. In this case, we see, in effect, the FCC playing filmmaker.