Under pressure from a key House Republican, the Federal Communications Commission recently released a fact sheet designed to inform cable subscribers as to how to block adult sex channels that leak audio and video snippets onto adjacent channels.
The commission's response was designed to mollify Rep. Jim Greenwood (R-Pa.), who wrote FCC chairman Michael Powell in July with concerns about the agency's effort to combat adult-programming signal bleed on cable-television systems.
Greenwood is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, a powerful perch from which he's allowed to probe the activities of various federal agencies, including the FCC.
In the fact sheet, the commission spelled out its definition of signal bleed and the legal means by which cable subscribers can block it under a provision of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which passed as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
The FCC referenced the section that requires the cable operator, upon a subscriber's request, to fully scramble the audio and video of the bleeding channel without charge. That provision applies to the cable industry, but not to its competitors.
The agency said the cable operator is required to take action only in response to a subscriber request, which must apply to a channel that the customer has not purchased.
The FCC also said cable subscribers may obtain a "lockbox" from the cable company that can cut off any channel. It also advised all consumers — and not just cable subscribers — of the availability of new TV sets with "V-chips" that can delete programming on a per-show and per-channel basis.
All told, the FCC issued a news release, a public notice and a fact sheet on signal bleed, but never referred directly to cable pornography or adult programming. The phrase repeatedly used was "objectionable content," even though Greenwood's letter to Powell made specific reference to "sexually oriented programming."
In his letter, Greenwood recounted a recent meeting between his committee staffers and FCC personnel about the agency's efforts to collect data on the prevalence of signal bleed by adult cable channels.
Greenwood said FCC staff informed him that the agency "dropped the entire matter" after the Supreme Court struck down a related provision from the 1996 law and associated FCC rules that required all multichannel-video programming distributors either to fully scramble adult channels or air such programming only between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.
"This is simply unacceptable," Greenwood said in his three-page letter. "As you start your tenure as chairman of the FCC, I urge you to investigate the scope of the signal-bleed problem and determine what supplementary measures, if any, are necessary to protect our children from viewing sexually explicit cable programming through signal bleed."
FCC sources could not immediately say whether the agency was attempting to collect signal-bleed data.
