North of the Shire

The Supreme Court ruled against Fox and NBC in an FCC fine case and upheld fines that were levied for indecency going back to an incident in 2003 with Bono of U2 on NBC and in Fox’s case, although not fined, they sought a ruling on a couple of incidents with Cher and others in 2002 and 2003. 

I heard a report on this, praising the Supreme Court, from Teresa Tomeo on her broadcast, Catholic Connection this morning.  While I agree with her that this is a good thing, I find it difficult to get overly excited about it.  Why?

First of all, I know that Teresa Tomeo sees the big picture of the secular media and she knows that in the grand scheme this is only a small part of the issue, that is, making sure that there is clean language on air at least before a certain time of night when children are supposed to be in bed.  There is so much more than this at issue regarding the message of the content of the programming, such as the depiction of automatic sexual activity as the norm between any two people that are attracted to each other regardless of their marital status to each other and to other people.   Murder and mayhem are given glorified treatment in many cases and there is a steady stream of violence generally.  And so on and so on.

So, while this victory of the FCC is good and laudable on the part of the court, placed in the overall context, it truly is a small victory for decency.   I am reminded of the line from the Clint Eastwood movie The Outlaw Jose Wales;

The character Fletcher, leader of band of southern fighters near the end of the Civil War, brings his men in to surrender to the Northern Union forces.  While as the leader he is in the tent with the Senator and receiving his money for bringing in all his men, the Union Red-legs open up with a machine gun and kill all of the men lined up to take the pledge of allegiance.  He protests in anger to the Senator…

Fletcher: Damn you Senator! You promised me those men would be decently treated!

Senator:  They were decently treated.  They were decently fed and then they were decently shot.

That may be fiction but it highlights how decency means different things to different people.  Does this ruling mean we can shoot people on TV and glorify it, encourage people to jump in the sack at a moment’s notice but we will get in trouble if we swear at them? 

Call me a nitpicker but I just can’t get too excited about this news.