Captioning

I am opposed to censorship. Let’s get that straight off the bat. For the government to tell someone that they cannot tell me something (or vice-versa) is personally offensive and philosophically dangerous. Only in a few exceptional cases (national security being the most obvious) do I accept such restrictions.

Censorship is deadly serious — which is why when I see people bandying about the word loosely, it seriously irks me. Private restraint of private speech (ABC deciding to not let people talk about a particular topic, or particular slant on a particular topic) is not censorship. It may be stupid, oppressive, despicable, or otherwise worth boycotting them for (or not), but it’s not censorship.

Nor is this issue, even though, in this case, the government is involved.

The Department of Education has apparently changed the processes by which it decides how to offer grant money to organizations that pay for closed captioning. Previously, these organizations had their own consumer boards that expressed an interest in what shows to caption; the DoED has evidently done some preliminary review (behind somewhat closed doors) and identified shows that it considers acceptible (and non-acceptible) for grant money to caption.

Some observations:

1. Transparency in government is desirable. If there are criteria used to make determinations of this sort, or a group put together to do so, the proceedings should be public. In this case, the DoED seems to be making decisions without a clear, public definition.
2. Public input to governmental processes and decision-making is almost always desirable. There are times when it is not, but those are the exceptions, not the rule. Certainly something like this is inconvenient to have have public input, if only because everyone has a favorite show, and every show has its fans. Inconvenience and controversy, however, are no more legitimate a reason to hide a decision-making process than they are to avoid making decisions.

3. The DoED obviously has only so much money. It’s not the government’s job to caption every TV show. I’m as much a fan of Samurai Jack as the next person (and maybe more than most), but I don’t think my tax dollars are best spent on its captioning (vs. other purposes to which they could be put), any more than it should be spent on generating audio CDs to be put on comic books for the blind. That’s not insensitivity (I would be really unhappy were I to lose the ability to read comic books), but I don’t think that’s the government’s primary responsibility with my tax dollars.

4. The DoED’s list is not censorship. The government is not banning captioning of the shows involved, simply declining to pay for it. The rights of the disabled are not infringed by the DoED not giving grant money to pay for captioning of I Dream of Jeannie any more than my rights are infringed upon by their not picking up Firefly for another season. Any third party who wants to pony up to CC Ed, Edd ‘n Eddy, or Hollywood Rocks the Movies (The 60’s), or Law and Order, or Justice League — more power to ’em.

Would I like to see every show on TV captioned? Sure. For that matter, I’d like to see an alternate audio track describing the action for the blind. Heck, I’d like every show on TV to be available on basic cable and broadcast, so that poor people don’t face a financial burden if they want to see CNN or the Golf Channel or HBO.

But I don’t necessarily think it’s the government’s job. And crying censorship over it only makes criticisms of true censorship weaker. It’s the Boy Crying Wolf thang, y’know?

And, heck, I enjoy and benefit from closed captioning, too — in restaurants and the like where the sound is turned down and I can follow along what’s being broadcast. That doesn’t make it a responsibility of the Federal government to be sure I can following along ESPN while queued up at Tokyo Joe’s at lunch.

There are some oddities on the lists, to be sure — the sort of strange judgment calls that prove the first points above. Why, for example, is Angelina Ballerina eliglble for grant money, but Stanley isn’t? Is Chalkzone really that much more educational than Sheep in the Big City? Is Max and Ruby better than Time Squad?

But those are, ultimately, judgment calls (though ones that there should be accountability for). The basic idea that the DoED should be paying for educational TV, vs. entertainment TV (even if one can argue that entertainment TV can be educational) seems pretty clear to me. Paying money to make sure that deaf people can follow along ABC World News seems a lot more important — or at least more tax-worthy — than that they can follow along ABC Sports coverage of the NBA, regardless of claims that cutting off federal funding of captioning of sports events will isolate deaf adults and kids.

I don’t think that makes me a censor.