Bay of Fundie

In our last installment, we looked at a report by the Parents Television Council that described how offended they were about network television. So offended, in fact, that they sat there and counted every incident on every show that pissed them off.

Today I want to examine their findings in greater depth. Maybe this will give us some insight into what makes these people tick.

Inappropriate Content in the Family Hour – OVERVIEW

There is no such thing as a “Family Hour”, so it’s impossible to have inappropriate content there. It’s pretty easy to get a report to say what you want when you get to make up the criteria.

Overall, only 10.6% of the 208 episodes were free of violent and sexual content and foul language.

If the PTC fundies are so offended by TV that they can only find 10% of it that isn’t offensive, one thing is obvious: These people shouldn’t own televisions.

Worst Network

This is interesting. The network with some of the best shows is the network that they hate the most! Hmmm… I wonder if there’s a connection…

Language

Here’s where the report gets really interesting. These people are so offended by foul language that they blush when broadcasters bleep the word “damn”! So what does the PTC do? They release a vulgar report! Here’s a fine table about language:

It seems to me that if you want to avoid being offended, you shouldn’t read the PTC’s report!

Sexual Content

This section doesn’t say much (other than how offended by all of it they are), but it includes over a page of examples of all the steamy and raunchy things they saw. They really seem to savor the retelling.

Violence

Just like the last section, this is mostly examples, which go on at great length. I do agree with them that violence on TV is a problem, but I feel that it is parental responsibility that should come into play here, not government responsibility.

Conclusion

Here they just gripe all over again about how bad it is. And they don’t want to hear about any solutions that don’t involve government regulation:

Though they have promoted multi-million dollar campaigns to highlight parental controls based on content ratings and the V-chip, parents have found such tools useless. As shown in previously published Parents Television Council studies, the TV ratings are confusing to parents and are applied inconsistently by the networks.

So because the system didn’t work flawlessly out the gate, we should just scrap the whole thing? And how stupid are these parents, anyway? Their children spend over three hours per day watching television, and they can’t be bothered to take ten minutes once to read how the ratings work and how to activate the v-chip? Considering how influential television can be to a developing mind, any parent who doesn’t take the time to learn about the ratings system and the v-chip is negligent.

In the remainder of this section, the PTC claims it is the obligation of parents to pressure the broadcasters and the government to clean up television.

No, it’s not. It’s the obligation of the parents who mindlessly agree with the PTC report to clean up their own parenting skills.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 9th, 2007 at 8:10 pm and is filed under Censorship, Church and State, Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.