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

[tommdroid.livejournal.com]

this must be something a exclusively US thingie. I don't understand anything/something/nothing. uhu?? x 2. it does not compute.

[ragdoll.livejournal.com]

I read about it on Neil's RSS feed last night. Was too tired to comment about it but it is unbelievably bizarre, isn't it? Dexter's Lab and other cartoons are not allowable for cc'ing? Why not?

[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.

[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.

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[anotheranon.livejournal.com]

Well, I can see why the DOE wouldn't offer closed captioning - they aren't educational shows. I would think that only documentaries and PBS would qualify, if they're sticking to a strict requirement of "educational".

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[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.

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[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.

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[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

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[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.

"We're from the government, and we're here to help - - "

[timcharmorbien.livejournal.com]

It's not so much the government's reversal on what shows they will close caption as the fact that a) they have announced that they have new guidelines, but won't tell anyone what those guidelines are, and b) won't tell anyone who is on the panel that decides what programs the government will pay to close caption. Is this a state secret of some kind? Are we trying to keep our precious closed captioning resources safe from terrorist threats? It's just the kind of paternalistic attitude that the Bush administration seems to favor. "Don't worry your pretty little heads about our procedures, or those people we've detained indefinately without legal counsel, we know what's best for you, America! Now, run along and play!"