PTC Pushes Congress, FCC for Less Pixelated Flesh

The Parents Television Council is sending letters to the
Hill complaining about pixelated nudity in primetime TV and asking legislators
to pressure the FCC to clear out its backlog of indecency complaints, now
totaling over 1.5 million, according to the group.

PTC says it is not asking for more laws, just more restraint
from industry and more action from the FCC on pending complaints.

Last month, the Supreme Court signaled that the FCC could
enforce its fleeting indecency policy so long as broadcasters had sufficient
notice, which the Chief Justice suggested the FCC had now provided.

PTC is complaining that the incidents of pixelated nudity
have dramatically increased in recently seasons, and that they have gone from
strategically-placed items and black parts to the pixelated approach that it
says providers "the full body of flesh tones depicted during full-body
nudity scenes where sexual organs are blurred or pixelated," which PTC
says is more explicit because it "could be perceived to be a closer
simulation of complete frontal nudity given that the viewer is seeing all flesh
tones."

An FCC spokesman was unavailable for comment at presstime on
how the FCC was working through that backlog of complaints and whether it would
be seeking comment on how to proceed.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.