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:

[ragdoll.livejournal.com]

It's just a strange line they've drawn and I also don't think that deaf kids should be kept from watching any form of entertainment just because it's not 'Educational'. I think there's more to be learned from Dexter's Lab than Barney but that's just me. LOL

Re:

[anotheranon.livejournal.com]

Oh, I quite agree that deaf kids should be able to watch whatever they want! But I do think that with budget cuts and with the myriad problems of public education in this country, the Dept. of Education probably would better spend their money on something other than closed-captioning for animated series.