MADER'S RANTS Censorship: Part II March 12, 2004 - So, when last we left our noble hero (me), he was explaining the fundamentals of the entertainment biz. He was pontificating in the simplest terms possible so any civil servant - Republican or Democrat - reading this could grasp it. The entertainment industry only makes what people want to watch! The “pop up book” version of this liturgy will be available for the FCC commissioners free of charge and delivered via UPS. Look for a brown shirt near you. Oh! Hey, that pun worked better than I thought! So, what should the industry do? Well, let’s look at this practically. A huge driving force behind this is the fact it’s an election year. Luckily, the American people and the Feds have very short attention spans when it comes to trivial stuff like this. They will make some noise, rattle some cages. If Stern would stop whining like a school girl he could survive this pretty much unscathed. In a few months, no one will care. FCC regs are like the rules in high school. They enforce them, then after a while ya push the boundaries a little at a time. They let things slide, and before you know it, Fox can go back to planning to televise live executions right after their next installment of “Who Wants to Marry a Quadriplegic, Ebola-Infected, Epileptic Seizure-Having, Heroine-Using, Alcohol-Abusing, Child-Molesting, Welfare-Collecting, Flannel Shirt-Wearing, Country Music-Listening, Chevy Camaro-Driving, White Castle-Eating Dwarf” - Wed at 8:00 p.m. eastern, 7:00 central. Check your local listings. Two side notes: 1) If I just offended someone in that demographic? Tough! Your life is fucked, anyway. 2) If you are a Producer, and Fox ever rejects a show you submit because it doesn’t fit their standards and program formatting, don’t necessarily feel insulted. The point is, this shall pass. However, if just biding your time isn’t your style, then lets consider the following. (NOTE: This is a complete fantasy. It will never happen. I will explain at the end.) Okay! The idea is that for a period of 48 straight hours, every newspaper, movie theater, radio, broadcast and cable station shut down. Nobody transmit or print a thing. What the FCC and everyone else forgets is that the industry controls the flow of information. What if no one carries a Presidential address on TV? Hmmmmmmmm... I hear crickets. Of coure, this would never work. There are too many people to organize. Still, a vast majority of what you see, read or hear is controlled by a handful of people. CBS programs UPN for example. Discovery Communications runs thirteen different networks. If ya really want to narrow it down, Vivendi Universal, mighty VIACOM and Disney pretty much run the majority of the media in the industrialized world. Not all. But for the price of a really expensive lunch you could sit down with 3 or 4 people, talk it over during drinks and shut down a vast majority of it. Think of it as civil disobedience but on a truly grand scale with a Martini. But the FCC controls the licenses. Yes, but they don’t control the machinery that make it all work. Saying the FCC controls anything is like saying, “Just because you lost your drivers permit you suddenly have been struck dumb and can’t drive a car.” It’s an absurd assumption. The transmitters... the printing presses... hell, even a big chunk of the satellites are privately owned. The owners may do with them what they please. The flashiest toy, aka the satellite, can be put in orbit by a half dozen different countries. The Feds don’t even control access to space any more. Really, when it comes to free speech and controlling what does and doesn’t go on the air or in the papers, the government is a feckless (look it up, class) wonder. So why won’t it work? Money. Not in fines but in advertising revenue. You would lose billions. See, Hollywood is great for talk of protesting, but when a dollar amount is attached you suddenly hear the sound of millions of sphincters puckering from the valley all the way down too Santa Monica and past Culver City. Martin Sheen getting arrested for protesting nukes then posting bail two hours later doesn’t count. He never really risked anything. Susan Sarandon bitching in public only to go bang Tim and curl up in the multi-million dollar home isn’t really suffering for the “cause,” either. They may be nice folks, don’t get me wrong. But they’re a poor substitute for Gandhi or Martin Luther King. A media strike will never happen because regardless of what pain the FCC might inflict, it’s nothing compared to the wrath of Budweiser. Later, Mader