Sen Ted Stevens' Plan for Censoring both Cable TV & the Internet

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The latest assault on cable TV’s creative freedom comes from octogenarian Republican Senator Ted Stevens, chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. Stevens and his committee are considering a censorious House-passed “indecency” bill regulating radio and TV broadcasters — legislation cooked up in the wake of the furor over Janet Jackson’s boob flash during the Super Bowl. And now, the weighty senator wants to extend its provisions — including a draconian new government-imposed ratings system. With an ironclad Republican Senate majority, Stevens usually gets what he wants.

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From the ACLU to libertarian conservatives, predictions of what the Stevens proposals mean are dire. “I think Stevens is probably laying the groundwork for another assault on speech online,” Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at the libertarian, free-market Progress & Freedom Foundation, told CNET, the online magazine about the Internet. “He’s obviously pointing the way to other members of Congress, saying that if they want to control the media, they have to start at cable and satellite first, and then target the Internet . . . This foreshadows the coming debate we’ll have over IP-enabled services in the video space.”

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And he’d throw in the Internet for good measure. Thunders the senator: “We ought to find some way to say, here is a block of channels, whether it’s delivered by broadband, by VoIP, by whatever it is, to a home, that is clear of the stuff you don’t want your children to see . . . I take the position that at the time the Supreme Court made its decision about cable, cable was just one of the ways for public access to television products. Today 85 percent of the television that is brought to American homes is brought by cable, and I believe that the playing field should be leveled.”

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It is particularly of note that Stevens says he hasn't received "any real complaints from Members of Congress about what I have been saying." If Grandpa Stevens manages, in a House-Senate closed-door conference, to lard up the House-passed bill with the provisions he appears to be suggesting here, there will be virtually no possibility of defeating the measure in either chamber. Only a major public outcry now offers the slimmest of chances to stymie this giant new step toward regulating internet and cable content.