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Originally posted by xoxoxoBruce
But HP, if the feds pick and choose what to fund, knowing full well if they don't fund it nobody will, isn't that censorship on the deaf? I agree it's not censorship on the media but what about the end user?

Well, stations get sponsors for closed captioning all the time, probably more often than the government pays for it. And in some cases, the stations just absorb the expense themselves.

I'm not agreeing with the government's actions, I think they've broken a few Stupid Barriers in their process of selecting which shows to support. And I definitely think the goverment uses its power to manipulate the media, to undesirable ends. I'm just pointing out that in this instance, there's no "censorship" that I can see. The government isn't forbidding stations from providing closed captioning, they're just not sponsoring it for certain programs anymore, programs which supposedly fall outside of the "educational, news or informational" category.

My disagreement is not really with the sentiment of the article, just with the language it uses. It's like a boy-that-cried-wolf thing... if too many people accuse the goverment of censorship where no real censorship is going on, it dilutes the anti-censorship argument. There is a problem with this government action, and it ought to be fixed, but I wouldn't call it "censorship." I highly doubt that Bewitched was denied money to pay for Closed Captioning because it contained some message the govenment is trying to squash... more likely the government is just doing a government-quality job of enforcing their "educational, news or informational" requirement, and making a futile effort to correct that.

I'm not big fan of the governemnt per se, but I don't think they're completely evil. Just mostly evil.