Family and Consumer Choice Act of 2007 - Premise

Premise

In 2004, following the controversial Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show where performer Justin Timberlake caused the exposure of co-performer Janet Jackson's breast for two seconds, the conservative media watchdog group Parents Television Council launched campaigns against indecency on television – both broadcast and cable. The Council released in November 2004 a study stating that there was a significant increase sex, profanity, and violence on basic cable television channels, using that study as well as numerous future press releases and reports in their push for à la carte cable offerings. PTC President Tim Winter also wrote an article arguing that cable choice would not only benefit families, but also the general public because cable television subscribers who do not have children would also have the choice not to pay for channels for younger audiences. PTC president L. Brent Bozell III wrote a similar op-ed for USA Today in April 2005.

Some cable providers, including Comcast and Time Warner Cable, have issued "family tiers", cable packages exclusively with family-oriented channels, but the PTC criticized such packages as not catering to the interest of the PTC's constituency, as both "tiers" omitted news and sports channels (such as CNN and ESPN) yet – in the case of Comcast - included such channels that the PTC deemed not "family-friendly", such as TBS for showing reruns of Friends and Sex and the City and USA Network for its reruns of Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Nevertheless, TBS does show programs the PTC has deemed family-friendly or inoffensive, including Major League Baseball coverage, Everybody Loves Raymond, Home Improvement, and The King of Queens, while also broadcasting the PTC-banned programs Dawson's Creek and The Drew Carey Show. In addition, USA Network currently shows PTC-approved programs JAG and Monk. The PTC also criticized Time Warner for many of the same reasons, also claiming that "ccording to Time Warner, classic movies are not appropriate for families. And neither is religious programming", referring to the omission of channels such as Turner Classic Movies and The Word Network from the package. In January 2006, then-PTC president L. Brent Bozell III argued during a United States Senate hearing on indecency that Comcast and Time Warner "have designed these family tiers to fail, because they would like nothing better than for the family tier concept to fail so they could claim after the fact that no demand exists for a different way of doing business in the cable industry." He later went on to claim that "cable channel choice to America's families ... is the only option available that creates a real free market in the cable industry." In February of that year, the PTC praised a report by the Federal Communications Commission for supporting à la carte cable subscriptions. In July, the PTC met with Congressmen Dan Lipinski and Tom Osborne to support cable choice legislation.

Other supporting organizations for cable choice have included the American Decency Association, American Family Association, Concerned Women for America, Coral Ridge Ministries, Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and Morality in Media. Additionally, Frederick S. Lane expressed support for cable choice in his 2006 book The Decency Wars: The Campaign to Cleanse American Culture, although expressing doubt that it would make a negative impact on channels that the PTC has deemed offensive, such as MTV and Comedy Central, claiming that those networks would continue to have plentiful viewership while religious channels would decline.