Steve Danuser commented on Raph Koster’s Signs of the Time, “Cable news is a joke. The FCC only cares about censoring smut, not monitoring fairness.” I could not agree more. I watch comedy shows — The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, and Real Time with Bill Maher — to get my daily dose of news and commentary. I think there was a recent poll that suggested most people do the same.

I believe the redesign and new direction of Time Magazine does signal a shift from simply reporting the news to increasing reader and viewer participation through discussion. After all, when I watch comedy shows, I expect a fair degree of bias, generalizations, and distortions of the truth. These shows amply bait the audience to delve deeper into their topics of interest on their dime. If you watched the film 300, chances are that when you returned home from the theaters, you jumped onto the Web and surfed to Wikipedia to learn more about the history of Leonidas I and Sparta. That is the power of entertainment.

This transformation, however, does not indicate the end of news reporting. Worthwhile commentary is driven by facts. If publishers of information were to engage in providing commentary on commentary, they would be relegated to blogs. News wires will continue to thrive and exist, but I think they will move deeper behind the scenes than usual.

With regards to Danuser’s statement about Federal Communications Commission and fairness, I wrote an editorial shortly after Superbowl 38 on that same issue. I have included the full text below.

Superbowl Sunday was a great day for TiVo whose viewership increased 180% in reaction to the stunt where Justin Timberlake was to pull away Janet Jackson’s bustier to reveal her red-lace brazier. As we know now, Timberlake pulled away too much. TiVo announced that hundreds of thousands of households used its unique capability to pause and replay live television to repeatedly view the incident. Also reported was a 12% increase of halftime viewership from last year.

While media and technology companies continue to profit, an intelligence failure in FCC prompted Chairman Michael Powell to launch an “investigation” into the Jackson-Timberlake stunt, and the entire halftime show. Powell cited “thousands” of complaints about the segment and commented, “I knew immediately it would cause great outrage among the American people which it did. We have a very angry public on our hands.”

Powell expressed his “great displeasure” of the incident in a telephone call to CBS President and CEO Mel Karmazin, who buckled under to FCC pressure. “Clearly somebody had knowledge of it. Clearly it was something that was planned by someone.” Powell appealed to parents claiming he was watching the game with his two children, and found the incident “outrageous” calling it “a classless, crass, and deplorable stunt.”

Powell added, “I don’t think that’s being moralistic, and I don’t think that’s government trying to tell people how to run their businesses. I don’t think you need to be a lawyer to understand the basic concepts of common decency here.”

Common decency should be a set of culture-specific moral principles for what is “right and appropriate” for consumption. If requiring empathy with the FCC edition of common decency is not being moralistic, then Plato and Socrates were not philosophers. Respecting hopes that children will develop in a safe and friendly environment is not unreasonable; however, the same is untrue of ignoring the silliness, as Presidential Candidate Howard Dean would say, of such a wasteful and clearly prejudicial “investigation.”

The authority on broadcasting ethics lacks the intelligence to make an informed decision to the exclusion of executive subjectivity. Superbowl halftime viewers were undeniably entertained and the American public is likely to care less about Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction than the more vociferous advocates of a “common decency” that disregards the complete viewership. FCC endeavors to appease minority demands instead of majority desires. Describing FCC as undemocratic and its moral prescriptions as detrimental to civil liberties would not be far from the truth.

FCC common-decency regulations are moral prescriptions forcibly imposed on public media organizations that provide entertainment and news. Due to hefty penalties associated with violations of FCC laws, media providers are bullied into conforming to what FCC thinks is “right and appropriate” for Americans regardless of actual culture and sensibilities.

In this sense, governmental morality is an artificial mechanism for limiting progress and freedom. Through these restrictions on citizens, the government gains power that the Founding Fathers had never intended or wanted the government to possess. This is not an advocacy of anarchy, however. This is a call to the public to realize that FCC severely endangers First Amendment liberties.