Michael Powell Is Outraged At The Boob Tube
Now it's the FCC's turn to reveal its boob to America.
Let's see...our country is waging a war on terrorist nations, the United States Senate was just
attacked with one of the world's most deadly toxins and FCC Chairman Michael Powell--the poster child for nepotism--is going to expend resources conducting a "thorough and swift"
investigation of the Super Bowl halftime show.
What is there to investigate? The facts are obvious: CBS retained its sister Viacom network, MTV, to produce the always tedious Super Bowl halftime show. During that 12-minute yawnfest, B-list rock stars sang off key, pranced around like rabbits in heat and, in one case, flashed a breast.
Investigation complete--and at no cost to the taxpayers.
But that's not good enough for Powell who says he's "outraged" because "my family and I gathered around the television for a celebration. Instead, that celebration was tainted by a classless, crass and deplorable stunt. Our nation's children, parents and citizens deserve better." He declared that the entire halftime show "crossed a heinous line" because it was "offensive" and "onstage copulation." (What or where that "heinous line" is, Powell did not say. Nor did he say when it became illegal for anyone to be "classless" and "crass," but a bullying bureaucrat never lets legal justifications stand in his way.)
Considering that every singer featured Sunday night is well known for sexually charged or even raunchy performances, it's odd that Powell and the other parents who are upset about their kids being exposed to a naked breast would allow their kids to watch the halftime show in the first place. And stranger still is that after the heavily sexual overtones of the show become apparent to anyone with a frontal lobe, these upset parents didn't promptly change the channel.
What transpired Sunday night is a matter between Viacom, the NFL and consumers. There is no constitutionally valid role for the federal government in this case. What's more, Congress should abolish the FCC since its only reason for exisitng is to arbitrarily apply subjective broadcast regulations, thus violating constitutional guarantees of free speech and equal protection.
Michael Powell has every right to be mad about what his family saw during halftime. But he has no right to unleash the power of the federal government simply because he failed as a parent to turn the television off.
It should not be the role of the FCC or any other organ of government to determine what children see on television. That's the job of parents. And, in this case, parents had plenty of time to preempt the boob.
