The Fellas at the $@!&*% FCC

"Family Guy," a satire driven animated show, by no means for kids under 17, nailed the FCC for its overreaction to their programming, with their song "The Freakin' FCC Song." Here are the lyrics:

They will clean up all your talking in a menace such as this
They will make you take a tinkle when you want to take a piss
And they’ll make you call fellatio a trouser-friendly kiss
It’s the plain situation!
There will be no negiotiation!
With the fellows at the freakin FCC!

They’re as stuffy as the stuffiest of the special interest groups…
Make a joke about your bowels and they order in the troops
Any baby with a brain could tell them everybody poops!
Take a tip, take a lesson! you’ll never win by messin’
With the fellas at the freakin’ FCC

Bridge:
And if you find yourself with some you sexy thing...
You’re gonna have to do her with your ding-a-ling…
cause you can’t say penis!

So they sent this little warning they’re prepared to do the worst
And they stuck it in your mailbox hoping you could be co-erced
I can think of quite another place they should have stuck it first!
They may just be neurotic, or possible psychotic
They’re the fellas at the freakin FCC!

Obviously, this song rubbed some people the wrong way, but the great thing about Family Guy is that it isn't afraid to take criticism for pushing the envelope and not censorsing certain things. I think that censorship is okay if used for the right reasons, like protecting to innocence of little children. However, relating to this class, if you censor things, you create a false illusion of reality, and your audience is trapped in a Plutonian cave where crude language doesn't exist.

You have to consider also, that there is a certain inevitability that people will eventually lose their innocence (that is, unless a person is sheltered to the point where their emotional growth is stunted). By the time kids reach a certain age, there are certain words, images, and things that they are inevitably going to know. You won't find a middle school student who doesn't know what sex is. It makes me wonder, why do people want to censor things that a majority of people have already been exposed to. My theory is that censoring TV content is a form of money making, allowing two versions of TV content available to the open market: censored and uncensored. The more ways you can reproduce the same material, the less money you spend. In return, since there is demand for both types of content, the businessmen end up with more money.

Deciding what does and what doesn't get censored is a bigger power than most people realize. Censorship doesn't just include removing certain expletives from TV shows, it also entails keeping information secret and not telling the whole story, such as some journalists do when reporting on a story.

However, we are making plenty of progress. Certain words that would've been censored 20 years ago are now seen as innocuous. Now, if we could just get the media to spill the beans more often...