40,000 people complain about Jerry Springer - The Opera….before it’s actually been screened. The large number does sound a bit fishy to me, no television programme gets that many complaints even after its screened (the controversial Brass Eye paedophilia episode only got 2,500). Are we now seeing what has happened in the United States, where heavily organised campaigns flood in from particular organisations? 99.8% of complaints to the FCC last year were made by one group, the Parents Television Council, a faith-based lobby group; most of the complaints are form letters which differ only by the signatory. I’d like to know if the complaints here are of a similar nature.
Mary Whitehouse’s legacy, Mediawatch UK (warning, site is designed to violate your eyeballs - you’d think they’d have a nice relaxing scheme, rather than one that makes the reader seek hard-core porn sites as a friendly-to-the-eye alternative) could be behind it, though I can’t find much information at the moment.
Regardless of who’s doing it, this is effectively a real-world DoS attack on the broadcasting organisations and regulators. While the right to complain about the content of broadcasting is essential (and to be fair, JSTO is pretty sweary, though it’s not IMHO blasphemous), efforts like this are an abuse of the organisations’ duty to review and read every complaint. Quantity, rather than quality of complaints, becomes the yardstick as to whether a programme should or should not be broadcast. If this campaign succeeds, it would mean in future, broadcasters could be at the mercy of any organisation capable of launching the ‘nuclear option’ of mass, carbon-copy complaints.
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January 7th, 2005 at 21:29:23
This made me chuckle from their website : “click here for printout of ‘Deluxe Designer Directory’ to place near your TV” so you can watch TV safe in the knowledge if you see something that offends you, rather than go to the effort of changing channel, you can ring up and complain, great.
Also I note that they don’t seem too keen to publish their own email address to complain to, even though the website is awash with the email addresses of other organisations. Are they afraid some people may disagree with them, or even be offended by their reactionary agenda?
P.S. I love “If you cannot access any menu option above check your address bar. All slashes should be forward facing” apparently its easier to write this than to fix their broken links!?!
January 8th, 2005 at 10:07:20
Dear complaining Christian people,
Thankyou for confirming that a) the iconography of your religion is more important to you than the moral content, and/or b) the moral content is archaic, censorious and incredibly shallow.
(How many broadcast hours of Songs of Praise were there last year, by the way?)
lots of love,
Tom
January 11th, 2005 at 08:26:35
Backwords Dave, apparently wrote a mail COMPLIMENTNG the BBC on screening the show, and got a form email back acknowledging his “complaint” and explaining why the show would go ahead even though he objected.
So don’t believe those numbers.
January 12th, 2005 at 23:00:32
As a largely uncomplaining Christian (of the Mark Thompson variety - there are lots of us about remember) I did take exception to one thing - the phrase ‘raped by an angel’ which I thought gratuitously offensive and unjustifiable. ‘Ravished’ I would have been OK with, but of course that wouldn’t have been outrageous enough.