Friday February 17, 2006

Indecency Complaints Way Down at FCC

In October, I talked about how indecency and obscenity complaints were way down at the FCC. Well, the commission has released its report on fourth quarter complaints, and while they were up in the last two quarters of 2005, they are way down from 2004—down by 83 percent, in fact. There were 233,471 complaints in 2005, compared to 1,405,419 in 2004. Here’s a graph that charts complaints for the last eight quarters.

What does it all mean? When complaints fell off in the second quarter, the FCC attributed it to a drop in organized campaigns like those orchestrated by the Parents Television Council. In the fourth quarter, 96 percent of the 44,109 complaints received were logged in December. The PTC filed a complaint against CBS’s N.C.I.S., and asked its website visitors to do the same, on November 15.