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

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.