are you a good witch, or a bad witch?

[anotheranon]

I found this through a circuitous route of email, BoingBoing, and Neil Gaiman's journal (don't think this has appeared on the LJ RSS feed yet): The Department of Education is deciding what will and won't get funding for closed captioning, and have chosen to exclude a bunch of shows that discuss witchcraft.

My first reaction was to launch a vicious diatribe re: how this violates church/state separation, how dare 5 people at the DOE decide what's worthy of captioning for the deaf, etc. And I do find it interesting that their choices for exclusion were deemed "inappropriate"...

But then I got to wondering - why does the Department of Education have ANYTHING to do with closed captioning? Shouldn't this fall under the FCC, or under the various government initiatives promoting accessibility for all? I also find it interesting that, like Neil Gaiman, this is the only article I can find on the subject, with no links to primary sources at DOE or elsewhere.

So much as I love to bash the Bush administration, I'm going to hold off until there's more to go on.

Comments

[gblake.livejournal.com]

This was being discussed on a mailing list I'm on and I'm not 100% sure things are as evil as they sound. To me the key sentence in that article is: "The National Association of the Deaf says the government used to caption these shows but abruptly changed course, deciding that the shows don't fit the required definition of "educational, news or informational" programming."

The thing I wasn to know is how long has that been the criteria for what shows get captioned. If it has been that all along my personal guess is that they'd been doing other shows because they had the resources. And now, for whatever reason, they don't have as much funding and so are slowly but surely cutting back on shows that don't fit into that criterea that closely. And I'm sure when you get to that point you're going to have to make a lot of gray area calls. Also this also doesn't prohibit the networks from adding captions on their own.

On the other hand I think the part that bugs me about this is that there's no room for public input.

Re:

[anotheranon.livejournal.com]

See my comment to ragdoll above - if they're belt-tightening, it makes sense that sitcoms and other programming that isn't strictly educational - witches or not - would get the cut first. And you are right - as semmie17 mentions below, the networks can always pay for their own captioning - and almost certainly will, in order to export their most popular tv shows.