- Until late night talker Stephen Colbert became a target, many people didn’t realize the FCC looks into every complaint of on-air obscenity. Time to revisit that practice? [Amy B. Wang and Callum Borchers, Washington Post; Volokh]
- First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams on his new book, The Soul of the First Amendment [Cato podcast, panel discussion with Abrams, Ronald Collins, and Ilya Shapiro, Roger Pilon moderating]
- Worth a read: promote legal liability for speech and watch it come back to bite you, time and again [Jason Harrow, Take Care Blog on purported incitement by President Trump at his rallies]
- Irish blasphemy investigation of comedian/actor Stephen Fry, though quickly dropped, prompts major political parties in New Zealand to pledge repeal of that nation’s blasphemy law [Independent, U.K.]
- Singing legend Joan Baez on letting the other side have its say [Facebook post]
- On the Macron email dump shortly before the French election, Will Saletan: “All advocates of limits on campaign speech should think about this: Law-abiders can’t respond, so lawbreakers have the field to themselves.”
Filed under: campaign regulation, celebrities, Federal Communications Commission, First Amendment, free speech, New Zealand
4 Comments
So Stephen Fry, who is a talented comedian (and, unlike those who claim to be comedians in the US, is actually funny), is a heretic. He was, also, openly homosexual before that became trendy. I guess that has prompted New Zealand virtue signalers to forcefully attack a 95 year old Irish law that’s been ignored since enactment. If the matter has any significance, it shows that laws no one enforces can be raised to supreme importance so people who face no possibility of an adverse consequence can demonstrate faux heroics.
Lest there be any ambiguity, the blasphemy law the New Zealand lawmakers announced they would take steps to repeal was a New Zealand law. Why there should be anything wrong with making an overseas controversy the occasion to notice and correct an obsolete yet dangerous part of one’s own laws, why correcting such an obsolete yet dangerous part of one’s own national laws would count as faux heroics, why anyone in Ireland should mind, and what any of this has to do with virtue signaling is beyond me.
Regarding the FCC complaint about Colbert —
Apparently the FCC policy of investigating every complaint of on-air obscenity has never changed despite its abuse by organized (and sometimes disorganized) complaint mills. Periodically there arise organized complaint filing groups, often religiously based, who file various complaints with the FCC en masse.
These days most broadcasters have recordings of every minute of their broadcasts. Such complaints are usually quickly resolved by review of the specific broadcast time complained of. The form letters go out to the complainants if the FCC chooses, and the matter becomes yet another bogus complaint in a long history of organized bogus complaints from loosely organized nuts.
At least one long repeated FCC complaint has developed a life of its own. The ongoing and infamous complaint campaign about FCC rulemaking proposal RM-2493 has generated more than 30 million complaint letters in its forty year life, and is still generating hundreds per year. The FCC has been trying to lay it to rest since it began.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RM-2493
for a good overview and links to more detailed information and news on the subject.
Funny, this works for 2nd amendment rights too: “On the Macron email dump shortly before the French election, Will Saletan: “All advocates of limits on campaign speech should think about this: Law-abiders can’t respond, so lawbreakers have the field to themselves.””