Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution)
"The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday approved legislation to crack down on television and radio broadcasters who violate rules limiting indecency by sharply raising fines," Reuters writes today.
Somehow, however, I doubt that there will be any fine for a much bigger act of indecency that appeared on the CBS News program 48 Hours Investigates last night. To be fair, the program, "Searching For Angela Shelton," was on the whole about as good as t.v. news gets, but in the second half there was a second on filmmaker Angela Shelton confronting her father over his physical and sexual abuse of her when she was a child. Leslie Stahl introduced the segment by saying the language would be rough, which it was if you count the words that were bleeped out.
What purpose did the bleeping of words like "suck" and "fuck" serve? Anybody with a tender enough ears so that they shouldn't hear such sounds, probably shouldn't be watching the program. And, for me and I suspect others as well, it was distracting to run into yet another division between what I saw and "reality."
This reminds of an segment I saw on CNN a few weeks ago -note to Micah: watch less news- where a U.S. Congressman was promoting a bill that would ban certain words from the t.v. The anchor made it clear that these words would not be said on the segment, meaning viewers across the country thought this guy was trying to ban "ain't."