• Multichannel News, Wednesday, October 18, 2006 12:15 PM

Viacom and CBS chairman Sumner Redstone believes that a crackdown on supposedly "indecent" programming by the Federal Communications Commission has introduced a climate of fear, in which a relatively few people are dictating popular tastes.

He laments that thousands complain about shows they have never seen--yet their complaints can "result in an indecency fine 10 times higher than it was a year ago," he says in a speech to the Media Institute's annual salute to defenders of free speech. He notes that TV stations altered their schedules to avoid scrutiny by the FCC, and that more than 11 percent of CBS affiliates "pre-empted or moved" an award-winning program about 9/11 firefighters at the World Trade Center just to play it safe.

The stations, Redstone says, acted because they had been "hounded by pressure groups and fearful of onerous fines" related to "language deemed to be indecent."

Read the whole story at Multichannel News »