Category: News

Activist group accounts for 99% of all FCC compaints

From Mediaweek.com:

In an appearance before Congress in February, when the controversy over Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl moment was at its height, 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 the Parents Television Council, an activist group.

This year, the trend has continued, and perhaps intensified.

Through early October, 99.9 percent of indecency complaints—aside from those concerning the Janet Jackson “wardrobe malfunction” during the Super Bowl halftime show broadcast on CBS— were brought by the PTC, according to the FCC analysis dated Oct. 1. (The agency last week estimated it had received 1,068,767 complaints about broadcast indecency so far this year; the Super Bowl broadcast accounted for over 540,000, according to commissioners’ statements.)

Interesting statistics, and perhaps further proof that the majority of people feel that they have more than enough control over the public airwaves in the form of their remote, without the need to complain to the FCC anytime they come across something they find objectionable.

“Half of all gay teen males have AIDS” and other falsehoods

The following comes from the Washington Post

Some Abstinence Programs Mislead Teens, Report Says
By Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 2, 2004; Page A01

Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person’s genitals “can result in pregnancy,” a congressional staff analysis has found.

Those and other assertions are examples of the “false, misleading, or distorted information” in the programs’ teaching materials, said the analysis, released yesterday, which reviewed the curricula of more than a dozen projects aimed at preventing teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease.

In providing nearly $170 million next year to fund groups that teach abstinence only, the Bush administration, with backing from the Republican Congress, is investing heavily in a just-say-no strategy for teenagers and sex. But youngsters taking the courses frequently receive medically inaccurate or misleading information, often in direct contradiction to the findings of government scientists, said the report, by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), a critic of the administration who has long argued for comprehensive sex education.

You can read the rest of this story here.

FTC changes your access to your credit report

According to the Federal Trade Commission, consumers will be able to request free copies of their credit reports very soon:

Soon you’ll be able to get your credit report for free. A recent amendment to the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) requires each of the nationwide consumer reporting companies to provide you with a free copy of your credit report, at your request, once every 12 months. The FCRA promotes the accuracy and privacy of information in the files of the nation’s consumer reporting companies. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the nation’s consumer protection agency, enforces the FCRA with respect to consumer reporting companies.

This will no doubt anger those companies who routinely made $25 for access to your latest credit report.

The 2004 Election

The race is over. John Kerry has made the call to the President.

Despite what many will say, I personally do not believe the loss of the presidency is the start of the end of the world. I believe that things will progress, more or less, like they have for the last four years, which is to say in a direction I don’t like. But left-leaning extremist talk of Bush enacting a civilian draft and taking over Iran, North Korea and France are just as dumb as talk from the right-leaning extremists about how a Kerry win would have led to a terrorist attack thereafter.

What the democrats need to do is what the republicans are doing right now, and that’s sitting down and looking at where they lost and immediately planning for the 2006 and 2008 elections based on that.

Slate.com has a new piece that says

If you’re a Democrat, here’s my advice. Do what the Republicans did in 1998. Get simple. Find a compelling salesman and get him ready to run for president in 2008. Put aside your quibbles about preparation, stature, expertise, nuance, and all that other hyper-sophisticated garbage that caused you to nominate Kerry. You already have legions of people with preparation, stature, expertise, and nuance ready to staff the executive branch of the federal government. You don’t need one of them to be president. You just need somebody to win the White House and appoint them to his administration. And that will require all the simplicity, salesmanship, and easygoing humanity they don’t have.

I agree with that. If you look at many of the polling numbers “not Bush” beat Bush pretty handily, but Kerry only managed to tie with him. The democrats really suffered when they went with the most “vanilla” and “most likely to win” candidate in their primaries, rather than the one who was the strongest on the issues they wanted to advance.

The republicans on the other hand need to be mindful that even though they won the election, they still don’t have a clear mandate from the people. In fact, while the percentages aren’t all that different from 2000, the number of voters increased significantly, implying that we as a country are just as equally divided as before, but the strength behind each side of the division has increased.

So now, in many ways, we’ll get to see how Bush would have fared politically had September 11th never happened. He’s still got many of the problems he walked into four years ago before the attacks, like a a weak economy and rising job losses, to face.

Four more years, indeed.