Look for Chilling Re-Regulation in the Media in 2005

The Federal Communications Commission and Congress are likely to take steps to curtail press freedom in 2005, a University of Alabama communication expert predicts.

“The FCC and Congress are incensed. The public is fed up. The 5-second delay is just the tip of the iceberg,” says Dr. Jennings Bryant, holder of the Reagan Chair of Broadcasting and director of the Institute of Communication Research in UA’s College of Communication and Information Sciences. “The media will take the heat from the fallout of Janet Jackson’s breast-baring Super Bowl performance, Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s smut-mouthed post-NASCAR-race interview, Latrell Sprewell’s sexually oriented vulgar outburst at a female heckler, and scores of other episodes that the public assesses as assaulting the boundaries of propriety.”

Bryant says the media essentially are innocent messengers in all of these faux pas that occurred only because the public demands live coverage of all sorts of spectaculars. Nevertheless, these incidents provide just the sort of excuse eager regulators need to begin descending that slippery slope toward re-regulation, to make that first screw-turn of censorship, he says.

To date, Bryant says, the most blatant censorship has been self-censorship by the standards-and-practices divisions of television networks, with FCC fines and forfeitures serving as a relatively small stick. However, because a sizable portion of the public has become so anti-media, “the fourth estate is increasingly being left out of implicit definitions of Public Good,” he says. “It is highly likely that the pressures on ‘prior restraint’ of media will mount during 2005, leading to new regulations on press freedoms.”