IgorBird122 : I agree with your freedom of speech post. At the end of the day no matter how much people are against it or for it is somewhat of an infringement. I can simple choose to not watch a show if I don't like it. When censorship starts, where does it stop? That's the question I always ask myself.

In an era where doing anything can be censored, what's the point in censoring something when there's harsher things in life - like Marmite!
But seriously, just put a warning label before the show starts/after the advert break and be done with it. What's the point in blanketing the kids when their parents could buy them Call of Duty/Grand Theft Auto?

Censorship is pretty stupid to me. Everything has their own unique style of words and directing. Like for example, if one uses profanity on a tv show, the profanity is part of the way that one expresses one's self and is somewhat part of the show. Censorship limits our freedom of speech due to it. I mean everything is pretty much fake and/or scripted if censorship gets in the way of it. There's no censorship in real life like come on. Get real with it!

It depends on what should be censored from my point of view. TV 14, censor a little bit, but TV MA just go all out with it. F-Bombs, S-Bombs, WXYZ-Bombs. I get they try to protect the kids if they accidentally watch a show, but they gonna eventually learn this stuff in real life.

a-sassy-black-lady :   Without censorship, television would be pornographic most of the time. You might think some television stations would not allow even some erotic content and you would be right... at first. Unfortunately, the more an audience sees something the more they are influenced by it. What you may see as an easing of censorship is actually the society's adaption of tastes in regards to what it views as normal. Don't forget that those that work for the FCC are people too. They watch TV as well. They want it to be good.





Television writers also want television shows to be good. They cast about for things that stand out to be put in their scripts. They tend to write things that are out of the ordinary. They look for events that would be abnormal. They look at people that would not behave normally. People that behave correctly in the best of circumstances just are not interesting television characters. Television writers never write about a well-mannered person whose day to day life is a trite but happy routine like most of ours. They write about people who have tough/dangerous/unusual jobs or experience their life/career/romance hanging in the balance in every episode. As a direct result, television characters are not well-rounded people. They are unstable. They murder. They steal. They commit adultery. They are not normal.





The more a censoring organization views this as the same old television they have seen their entire lives, the more they allow to get through. When they see more of the same, so do we. People who are very young or clinically insane would view television behavior as normal. Par for the course. Ever had a teenager behave very dramatically towards you. It's not just hormones. It's how young they are. They are mimicking what they see on their TV. Every emotion becomes an extreme one, just as they have been taught by their glowing companion with an off-switch.





In trusting television too much to guide us and give us truth, we influence our reality into one where the most outlandish behaviors(using vulgar words, sexual promiscuity, drug use, exhibitionism, petty theft, partying until 3am, drunkenness, violence) become commonplace to the malleable human mind. The things you see happening on your television set today used to happen rarely to not very many people. Human actions will take the shape of their model. Your model is someone you idolize. We will model actions we see, even if we know it to be wrong. Even if we don't realize it and it's subconscious, we'll still do it without thinking.





Censors can only do so much to quell the tide that is shifting against peaceful human coexistence. Can they go too far? Well, the real question is what can we do to make them go the extra mile for us(yes they do it for our benefit) the way they used to? What is it going to take for the FCC to say, "No. Taking out a gun and killing someone is wrong and we don't want undiagnosed clinically insane people modeling that action in their lives anymore." ? They are not going nearly as far as they used to. What they have allowed has become accepted by society. What they haven't is still taboo. Can we hang on to that for just a little longer?





Freedom of speech is great. Talk all you like but don't lie to a police officer or your parents. Our talking freedoms walk hand in hand with our right to remain silent. Does everything television writers ink have to be played out of television in the never-ending quest to score high ratings? They will write anything that will score those higher ratings and keep their job which makes them the most immorally motivated preachers we actually listen to.





Everybody has a right to speak but can we tell them to shut it. Used to be we could. Censorship used to reliably give us that veto over that faulty moral reasoning that is now often displayed on television. The floodgates are wide open. They can't close until all the water has come roaring through. The FCC used to be those floodgates. They gradually creaked open over a handful of the recent decades. Now the FCC is accurately represented in the metaphor by a flimsy net spanning the falls. It catches garbage. It is in bad repair. Often a big piece of garbage finds a bigger hole. The net cannot be repaired or replaced until the water stops roaring through.





Do we as a society have to choose our actions from loftier models? No. It would be better if Jesus, the Dalai Lama, Buddha, Mother Teresa and others who seek peace and not war were sought more frequently as models though. The world would be better for it and we wouldn't need censors because every one of us would have that in us.





If you need freedom of speech, by all means speak up but have some morals. Don't depict negative actions as if they are normal to justify actions that you are guilty of. Don't degrade your own society with your pen!



P3

I agree that it can be a violation of free speech in some cases, but these rules were set up in a time when TV technology was quite limited. There weren't electronics that could block certain channels or shows with stronger TV ratings (like TV-14 or TV-MA), so there would be nothing stopping a 5 year old from seeing some very lewd stuff if the censorship rules weren't in place (because parents couldn't use the v-chips that are commonplace today). We didn't see any of that technology implementation until the late 90s. Even then, people freak out when nasty stuff slips by, like that Super Bowl thing in 2004.

Postman3's reply has another very good perspective on this.