• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, February 10, 2005

Brave are those minority officials in government these days who seemingly go against a cascade of morality players when it comes to TV and radio.

Take note network and advertising executives.

And take your hats off in respect for two Democrats -- Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Janice Schakowsky (D-Ill.) They are the only two of 48 who voted against a House Commerce Committee bill that would dramatically raise the fines against networks and performers on indecent broadcasts.

For individual performers, the fines will climb from $11,000 per incident to $500,000. This is much stiffer than the Federal Communications Commission's rules, where performers get one warning.

"I don't like censorship," Waxman said to The Hollywood Reporter. "I don't like the impact this is having because of self-censorship. I don't believe that the government should be in there to stand as a censor."

Similar brave sentiments came from Schakowsky: "I am more concerned about infringing the First Amendment than I am about my children or my children's children seeing Janet Jackson's nipples," she said.

In this tough political and advertising environment - where liberal tones are not only viewed as out of step but increasingly anti-American - those remarks are getting less airplay in an increasingly noisy world of rampant over-protectionism. In their usual effort for balanced reporting, it's always good to see press impress with some ink.

For networks and advertisers - even cable networks who don't abide by FCC rules - this will only mean more work for their businesses. Standard and practices executives must be working overtime, perhaps adding staff, to ensure that everything works according to some sort of hyper-clean, way-over moral standard. It's an extra business cost hurting any bottom line.

Last year it was Janet Jackson during the Super Bowl. This year there was no such controversy, but the unprecedented move of Fox and the NFL pulling a racy GoDaddy.com commercial during the broadcast of the Super Bowl is a hint of things to come.

The powers that be may be thinking of the programming content in their indecency efforts, but can advertising content be far behind? Already there are efforts to curb food advertising as it targets children.

And that's not all. Lawmakers have been grumbling about cable, satellite TV, and satellite radio, in their hopes of bringing it into the government's indecency domain.

Voices of dissent - on whatever low volume - are a good way to mete out fairness.