Closed-Captioning Provided by Right Wing Cabal

Last October, a right-wing cabal—er, an advisory board—advised the Department of Education to limit their free closed-captioning of television shows. On the cut list were 200 shows that will no longer be captioned for free by the DOE's Technology and Media Services for Individuals with Disabilities program. In many markets, these shows will still have captioning, because the grant program was mostly used by affiliates in markets that couldn't find corporate sponsorship of captioning. However, this incident provides a good example of how the Bush administration works.

Program guidelines say that shows wanting captioning should be "educational, news, or informational." You may have noticed that these guidelines have been mostly ignored. Jerry Springer, anyone? However, in this recent purge, initiated by a cabal of "five unnamed individuals," those guidelines were ignored. Almost all sports porgramming has been axed, as well as such standbys as Bewitched, Pokemon, an unnamed series of AMC documentaries, an unnamed series of five classic films on BET, I Dream of Jeannie, Jimmy Neutron, Sanford and Son, and the wonderful documentary Visions of Light. Documentaries aren't educational or informational? That's news to me. And no classic films that BET can round up are good enough for the DOE? Hmm. Approved shows are listed too. (See the whole list here.) You'll notice that there's no rhyme or reason to the lists: shows on the banned list are very similar to shows on the OK list.

Basically, it looks like a conservative group of parents, similar to the nipple-counters at the MPAA, were asked for their advice, which consisted of captioning the things they approve of politically, and their list was made law. Documentaries on gays in Hollywood, Hollywood and the Holocaust, and black cinema are out. Independent films are out. Popular television shows are out.

I can't believe that this issue didn't get any press at all. I only learned about it yesterday, when Travis (thanks!) told me about it on the train. I couldn't find any news articles on it; I had to settle for opinion pieces and advocacy groups. Here are a few, for your reading pleasure: Palm Beach Post, Carlisle Sentinel, National Association for the Deaf.

Secret advisory panels dictating policy. No notice given to the public. Arbitrary and nonsensical rulings. This is getting to be a pattern.