PBS Issues Indecency Guidelines in Response to FCC Fines
Responding to FCC rulings and $325,000 fines authorized by Congress, PBS issued indecency guidelines for its producers. Producers have been told to fully bleep offending words and black out lips shown uttering them, said Louis Wiley, exec. editor of Frontline, produced by WGBH Boston. Frontline adopted the new guidelines Tues. “I consider this a very sad moment for the First Amendment and I do think this is censorship by indirection,” Wiley told us. WGBH, WNET N.Y., and WETA Washington, D.C. are the major PBS producing stations.
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PBS laid down 2 new editing mandates for coarse language in a May 31 letter to producers and producing stations, a copy of which we obtained. PBS said the guidelines aim to put PBS programming in compliance with recent FCC rulings. When expletives must be “wiped or bleeped,” the entire word must be edited, it said. For instance, in dealing with “motherfucker” and other compound words. programmers previously had to cut only “fucker.” Now they must bleep the entire word. If a scene shows an individual saying “fuck,” “shit” or a variant and a viewer could tell from the speaker’s lips what’s said, the lips must be blurred digitally.
“The new PBS requirements are surprising because they go well beyond any prohibitions yet imposed by the FCC, Congress, or the courts,” said attorney Ernest Sanchez, who represents public broadcasters. But “chilling rules” are the inevitable result of a “lack of clear standards” from the FCC combined with congressional “hunger for new draconian fines,” said Sanchez, a former NPR gen. counsel. With maximum FCC fines at $325,000, there’s no more margin for error, he said: “One mistake can be the difference between a public broadcast station being in business or not being in business.”
The problem didn’t start with public broadcasters, but with commercial broadcasters, which have considered indecency fines just a cost of doing business, Sanchez said: “The result is not just self-censorship -- but anticipatory self- censorship --which is going to fall heaviest on serious and artistic programming for which public broadcasting is known.”
PBS had no formal indecency guidelines on how producers had to handle foul language and when to bleep or pixelate, WGBH’s Wiley said, adding he doesn’t think PBS is overreacting to the FCC rulings or increased fines. But he does think “we will begin the game of self-censorship now in fear of a government agency,” he said. The “huge club” the FCC has been given in response to “some things our commercial brethren” have done, also can be used against public broadcasters, Wiley said: “And we will be self-censoring, I guarantee you. We will remove those words before the audience ever knows about them.” As a result, the “power” of public broadcasters’ arts, public affairs and history programs will shrink because “we will be making decisions not based upon a careful look at what is necessary to tell the story, but rather because we are afraid,” Wiley said.
Public broadcasters are in a “particularly weak position” because unlike commercial counterparts they lack the financial wherewithal to contest rulings at the FCC or in court, Wiley said. For many stations, a huge “theoretical” fine is enough to cause a chill, he said. Last year WGBH withdrew its ususal indemnity to stations for Frontline program A Company of Soldiers in which soldiers under fire said “fuck” and the like. Only 14 of the more than 300 public TV stations broadcast the unedited version, he said. That was before the FCC’s Saving Private Ryan decision, he said. As the rules stood, he said, stations had “tremendous difficulty” deciding to broadcast A Company of Soldiers unedited, Wiley said. But with rules “reshaped with these huge fines, I can’t imagine a case where we would take that kind of risk,” he said.
Recent FCC rulings give broadcasters some guidance but aren’t very helpful, since each case is different, Wiley said. Ruling case by case, the agency leaves the producer in a quandary if there’s no case germane to a given issue. For instance, last year he “lost the battle” with WGBH’s lawyers over a program on Ohio prisons that included foul language spoken by a mentally ill inmate, he said: “The legal people said, ‘It is probably a strong case, but we don’t know so we just bleep it.’ That’s the direction you go in; it’s not a fight anymore. You just bleeped it or even worse you take that scene out.”
PBS should be both “cautious and proactive” in fighting the FCC on indecency, said Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy. PBS programs should be exempt from fines because most of them are of news or educational value, he said: “But it’s also clear, at present, that caution is warranted, given the new legislation passed by Congress. PBS is in a no-win position on this.”