FCC-CBS Agreement on KUTV Irks PTC

FCC-CBS AGREEMENT ON KUTV IRKS PTC
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
On Monday, Parents Television Council President Tim Winter criticized the Federal Communications Commission's consent decree with CBS over the airing of a "Without a Trace" episode on KUTV in Salt Lake City. Winter said that the FCC had "shamefully" tried to bury the news by releasing it the day after Thanksgiving. Winter added that the commission "let CBS off the hook not once but twice for airing the same indecent content," and that it "failed miserably to serve the public interest." “CBS has no credibility when it says its violation of the consent decree was ‘inadvertent,'” Winter said. “The truth is that CBS first ignored broadcast-decency law when airing a teen-orgy scene in the first place, and then again when it ignored the terms of the consent decree its own attorneys negotiated to absolve itself of responsibility for the content it aired.” He continued, “How can the FCC justify a newly adopted consent decree to replace an ignored consent decree? What assurance does the public, the owners of the broadcast airwaves, have that this new consent decree is any more meaningful than the one already violated by CBS?" The PTC wanted the FCC to either designate the station's license for hearing, which is essentially a trial to determine whether CBS got to keep the license, or to reopen the thousands of indecency complaints -- including ones on the same Without a Trace episode -- that CBS wiped away with the initial consent decree that cost it $3.6 million.
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