More Form-Generated Outrage From the PTC

Ever hear about outpourings of indecency complaints to the FCC? Hundreds of thousands of offended moms writing in to complain about bare breasts, bad words, or (less often) blood and guts? More than likely, they're the result of a single organization, Brent Bozell's Parents Television Council, which regularly floods FCC complaint boxes with form-generated outrage. Ars Technica's Matthew Lasar examines the PTC's most recent effort, a campaign against the Fox cartoon sitcom, Family Guy:

Every three months the Federal Communications Commission comes up with its Quarterly Report on indecency complaints, and we sit around scratching our heads. How come the latest stats, in this instance for the first quarter of this year, show the viewers relatively calm at 578 complaints in January, then 505 in February, followed by 179,997 in March?

179,997? Um, did we miss something? Did television really get that much more indecent in March? No worries. In these situations, we know what to do. We go over and check out the Parents Television Council's website.

…As is usually the case with these campaigns, PTC gave its readers the chance to "take action now" by filling out a pre-scripted FCC Web complaint with details about the show, enabling a potentially limitless number of champions of decency to file objections with the Commission. And as we've noted in the past, it's easy to pile the gripes on, because the FCC does not require complainers to certify that they've actually seen the program in question. And that, Ars readers, could very well be how we got the horses' share of 179,997 indecency complaints in March.

Over at TechLiberation, Adam Theirer has more. 

Here's Jacob Sullum on the PTC and complaint fraud and words you can't say on TV, Greg Beato on decency in Hollywood, and Jesse Walker on the FCC's war on indecency.