No Appetite in Congress to Take Up Broadcast Indecency, Hill Staffers Say

Congress isn’t interested in legislating on the issue this year, said an aide to Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C. “We haven’t tilled this ground much for four or five years.” The last time Congress passed a law to address broadcast indecency was in 2006, when lawmakers increased the maximum indecency fines on broadcasters from $32,500 to $325,000 (CD June 8/06 p1). DeMint is a “pretty strong free-market advocate and he thinks the market is pretty adequate to punish indecency,” his aide said: “So I don’t think he really has an appetite” to push for indecency legislation.

DeMint’s aide said he doubts the Senate Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on the matter. The aide suggested that some House members may address the issue in Wednesday’s Communications Subcommittee hearing on the future of the video marketplace. Then again, the ruling is “not nearly as high profile as the immigration and healthcare decisions, so I don’t know if the bandwidth for these members is going to allow them to really take on indecency right now,” the aide said.

A spokesman for Rep. Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif., hasn’t heard of any plans for an indecency hearing and had “serious doubts” that any indecency legislation will move in 2012, he said. That’s unless the networks “misread the SCOTUS [Supreme Court of the United States] ruling and take an ‘anything goes’ approach to programming like cable,” he said by email. “I don’t see that happening.”

Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., has kept a “close eye” on the backlog at the FCC, he said in a written statement late Thursday. “Last summer the commission reported thousands of license renewals and consumer complaints pending at the FCC for more than five years, pointing to ‘court intervention’ as a barrier toward eliminating its self-admitted sizable backlog. I have no doubt that we have not heard the last of this issue or challenges to Pacifica, but now that the Court has reached a final decision on the current saga, I strongly encourage the FCC to revisit and address items that have been gathering dust while the question of law was unsettled."

"There hasn’t been a awful lot of high-profile instances lately that tend to get the Hill’s attention on something like this,” said Dan Isett, director of corporate and government affairs at the Parents Television Council. “There has been no enforcement out of the FCC for four years, so it’s no surprise that it’s not exactly on the top of legislators’ to do list,” he said. “It is a status quo decision."

Isett said the ruling does give Congress a good opportunity to focus on FCC reform. “Processes at the FCC tend to be quite Byzantine … and if the process stinks then everybody is unhappy,” he said. “So there is a lot of room for the Hill particularly in reforming how the FCC does its business.” It “would do everybody a lot of good in terms of opening up these processes and letting people know … about what the commission is in the process of doing,” Isett said.

What’s interesting about the decision is that the justices didn’t question the authority given by Congress to the FCC to regulate indecency, said General Counsel Craig Parshall of the National Religious Broadcasters association. “They didn’t attack the authority of the FCC, they didn’t attack the congressional statute under which that authority was delegated,” he said. “They were very careful not to overrule Pacifica.” Parshall suggested that maybe some lawmakers are thinking “it is time to revisit this and assist the FCC in giving them a bit more guidance on the parameters.”