INDECENCY COMPLAINTS IN Q1 '06 SURPASS FULL 2005 COUNT Tony Sanders – Billboard There already have been more consumer complaints filed this year concerning obscene, indecent or profane programming on TV and radio than were filed for all of 2005.
The FCC’s latest tally of such consumer complaints in the first quarter jumped by 118,115 filings this year to come in at 275,131 complaints for the three months ended March. That’s a 75% increase over last year’s comparable 157,016 filings received in the first quarter of 2005.
For all of 2005, there were 233,471 indecency/obscenity complaints logged by consumers and consumer groups against radio and TV, with most of those coming during the first quarter of the year.
Last year, there was one month, January, in which the FCC received an enormous number of complaints, while the other two months showed relatively few such filings.
This year there were more than 130,000 complaints filed in February and a like amount in March. Specifically, the FCC’s Consumer and Governmental Affairs bureau says it received 138,527 complaints in February and 134,865 in March. It received only 1,739 in January, per the bureau tally.
The FCC’s report for the fourth-quarter of 2005 says that consumers logged 44,109 complaints about indecency/obscenity on radio and TV during the last three months of the year.
All of these numbers pale in comparison to the Super Bowl 2004 year, when 1,405,419 such complaints were logged and nearly half of those came during the first quarter of the year. |