February 19, 2004

Newsfeed: Lawrence Lichty

Lawrence Lichty discusses TV indecency

Congress is considering cracking down on profanity and indecency on television. Lawrence Lichty, department chair and professor of radio/television/film, says there are legal requirements being considered by the courts for what’s decent or indecent.

But the courts have been very open to the idea that there are local standards. The problem is that cable and broadcast are national, so you have a difficult problem in determining what the local standards are and how they should be applied.

Lichty doesn’t think television programmers are overreacting by cutting certain scenes from their shows.

I think they realize they have a constituency and they have to keep that constituency and make their viewers happy. The question of taste has always been very important in the relationship between the television industry and its audience.

Lichty says television in its infancy was much more a family medium.

As more and more stations went on the air, the stations and the networks tended to provide more programming for children in the earlier hours and adults in the later hours. Now that you have so many channels specializing in all kinds of programs, the three national networks and others are fighting with cable for that audience. That has been the single most important factor changing the programming. The networks are trying to be more daring. But this is not new; there were similar arguments in the earliest years of television.

According to Lichty, the argument over what is appropriate is not likely to end soon.

I think this might sound Pollyannaish, but having our society argue about what we should see and how we should see it and what is and isn’t decent seems to me a reasonable argument.

Lichty says the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) may find matters of indecency to be complicated.

The FCC is in a bind because it has the right to fine stations over matters of indecency. But every time it has tried to do this, it gets into a difficult problem of defining indecency. And I don’t know that there’s any government agency that is really set up to do this.

— Samira Puskar

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