Mr. Saxon Burns had a good point the other day about the pernicious intrusion of advertising on our television screens. But I’m even more disturbed by this story in Slate about a new effort by the Federal Communications Commission and Congress to limit what we can watch, in the name of–you guessed it– protecting children.

This article appears in May 3-9, 2007.

Getting hassled by The Man Mild-mannered reporter

11 replies on “The FCC Can Suck It”

  2. North America’s getting soft, Jim Nintzel, and the rest of the world is getting tough. Very, very tough. We’re entering savage new times, and we’re giong to have to be pure and direct and strong, if we’re going to survive them. Now, you and this cesspool you call a News Weekly and your people who wallow around in TV violence, your readers who watch “24” and “Heroes,” they’re rotting us away from the inside. We intend to stop that rot.

  4. Mr. Boegle, the television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears in the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television.

  6. ATTENTION EDITOR JIMMY BOEGLE: While we’re on the FCC, what’s up with all these big media (you know TW is such)blogs…even Ernesto has one now, over at:

    http://regulus2.azstarnet.com/blogs/neto/3799/

    Red Star is just wondering if now journalists are being assigned an additional duty of “blogging” (as if they didn’t already have blogs aka their columns). But if the original idea (and implied need) behind blogging was to co-opt/supersede big media, is the big media push in this new niche market a sort of counter-revolution right-back-at at-ya, the way it usually goes? Is anybody getting anywhere in this endeavor? How does the FCC fit into this? How might it?

    This is a Bonanno-free post and inquiry…

  7. Mr. Sleestacked, There are these marvelous devices on tv’s these days. I believe they’re called the off buttons.

  8. Red Star: I don’t accept your premise that blogging was invented to “supercede big media.” Indie bloggers — at least the ones who have any sort of an audience — are usually feeding off big media, so even if they THINK they’re “superceding” we big media types (the Weeklyowners’ headquarters: that thriving media hotbed of Sierra Vista, Ariz.), they’re not.

    (See an essay we ran on this a while back: http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Currents/Content?oid=77021).

    I can’t speak for what the Star is doing, but I can speak for what we did: We started this blog almost a year ago because it gives us a form to do things the print version won’t allow us to do, be it because of the once-a-week cycle, or because of space concerns. We don’t have space for Nintzel to write about The Shield in the dead-tree version, for example; as another, with this blog, we don’t have to wait to push news out until the dead-tree version hits the stands. We saw that other alt-weeklies (such as The Stranger were doing really great stuff with their blogs, and we thought we could do good stuff, too.

    Are we doing good stuff? I’ll leave that up to our readers. But if our page views are any indication — we had more than 70,000 page views on the blog in April — we’re doing SOMETHING that are bringing readers back.

  9. Editor Jimmy Boegle: Clearly the media are in a time of adaptation. Adolph Ochs, the new owner of The New York Times wrote in 1897, “All The News That’s Fit To Print” (which became the paper’s masthead). Who knows what dat old fool was driving at, but it’s unlikely he wouldn’t “get” the concept of page views…it’s all just changing so fast, don’t you think? Please advise!

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