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

[semmie17.livejournal.com]

I took a close look at this, and what I came up with:

This has nothing to do with deaf/impaired people, civil rights, discrimination, witches, or anything of that sort. I think people did not read the original wording of the article that Gaiman came up with -- and neither did the Brit Gaiman, who despite living for several years in Minneapolis is often confused by Yank economics, I've noticed -- his rabid fans read his mis-reading and jumped onto the bandwagon because of that.

If you look at the original article, and trace it back to the source, it's all about government funding. The gov't is cutting funding back on all sorts of things, and the captioning was part of a general funding program for the disabled.

Most television/film companies do captioning because they can sell their product easier to both disabled and to second-language consumers, not to mention putting other languages (spanish, korean, french) so that they can sell overseas. It would be bad business *not* to do so.

Why pay for captioning when you can get the government to pay for captioning? That's the rub -- if the gov't will no longer pay for it so that our taxes are not raised, then the businesses will have to find funding somewhere else. Bottom line: captioning will continue because film/tv manufacturers can't sell their programs without captioning.

Welcome to a Capitalist economy, folks.

Obviously some businesses who do "educational" programming have been receiving kickbacks from the government to cover the cost of closed captioning. Okay, fine by me. My taxes pay for it, sure. But now with gov't cutbacks, the kickbacks have to be cut. That makes sense too -- I don't want my taxes raised for a consumer market that is a very small one -- specifically "government-approved educational programs." This doesn't mean that there will be NO subtitles for ANY disabled programming. It just means that the government will not pay for specific ones, and that means the makers of such programs will have to find advertisers and/or outside sources to pay for the subtitles.

The uproar is making into a big illogical mess. This is not discrimination. Gaiman has it all wrong.

Re:

[anotheranon.livejournal.com]

I did think that Gaiman was a little worked up about it - it could be that writing fantasy/science fiction, he'd be oversensitive to anything that might just seem to censor his chosen genre. He may be a great writer, but everyone has their biases.

I also think it's worth pointing out that the original article linked above is an editorial, so that author had an agenda as well.