Speechy

In 1934, the Federal Communications Commission was created under the Roosevelt administration. Its creation brought us into an era in which a federal agency can decide the moral standards of our society; they can pick and choose what's right and wrong for us to hear. Even so, they are not solely to blame for restrictions on free thought. Other groups, including the Motion Picture Association of America, Parents Music Resource Center, and Entertainment Software Rating Board, have sought to label media that their members deem explicit. Censorship agencies are both more expensive and less ethical than private sector, voluntary alternatives which individuals and families can choose to implement. A national standard of "acceptable speech" is not applicable to the varying moral standards of different families and communities.

When the MPAA rates a movie, they screen the film to a select audience and these viewers give a collaborative rating based on the content at hand. Sounds fair enough, right? Well, not exactly. If these movies are given the most extreme rating, NC-17, then most film distributors and theaters won't even consider accepting it. In other words, these ratings hurt the media industry more than they help it. What's worse is that this situation is practically the same for video games due to the ESRB, and up until the 90's, was the same for music because of the PMRC and their “Parental Advisory” labels. While these rating systems were voluntary, they were not always an accurate representation of the media they covered, and as a result, business was lost. Advocates of censorship tend to argue that these organizations are beneficial to our society because they suppress mature content and obscure it from the vision of our youth, but is it their right to determine what is morally acceptable? If I would rather not shelter my child from swear words and violence because I feel like he can understand the context, should I not be able to? Would I not be the person who has the final word in this decision? Censorship should not lie in the hands of arbitrary force, it should be in the hands of the individuals who consume the products of media themselves, and if they're too young to decide, their parents should be the ones who regulate it.

While the MPAA, ESRB, and PMRC are non-profit organizations, the FCC is perhaps the most dastardly of them all because it not only censors our television and radio service, but every year, it receives $335.8 million worth of tax money as annual budget. Take some time to think about that logically- we pay $335.8 million to have a government organization decide what's right for us to watch and listen to. To make matters worse, the chairman of the FCC and many of its bureaucrats are appointed, not elected, so that means we have even less control over what they can censor from us. I've heard radio edits of songs in which words and phrases like “suicidal” and “nuclear war” have been cut out, and the strange thing is that these weren't even in a context that most people would consider inappropriate.

This federally supported, arbitrary censorship is the most threatening to our free speech out of all of the groups seeking to block out profanity, however, it is understandable that parents would raise concern about the difficulties of monitoring their children and their access to certain media if the FCC were to be abolished or at least stripped of their powers to censor. Despite all of this, because there would be no higher form of regulation and still a demand for censorship, the market would encourage the creation of new software that allows for more personalized censorship that isn't federally enforced, protecting us from the possibility of the FCC taking their regulation a bit too far.

Our First Amendment rights are perhaps the most important rights we have in this country- they allow us to express ourselves without being persecuted and propose new forms of thought to the traditional majority. Censorship bastardizes those rights. Our thoughts have become subject to the opinions of bureaucrats who think they know what is best for the masses. We need to stand together and assure that our rights aren't tainted by censorship that can easily be solved by alternative means.

Bibliography:

• United States. Federal Communications Commission. FCC Fiscal Year 2012 Budget Estimates. Web. .
• This Film Is Not Yet Rated. Dir. Kirby Dick. Prod. Eddie Schmidt. Perf. Kirby Dick. Netflix, IFC Films, BBC Films, 2006. Netflix.
• Visual Literacy project