I wrote about a week ago that entities need to re-evaluate how they measure complaints in the age of the Internet. The FCC is no exception. I also pointed out that I didn’t have enough raw data beyond the Frank Rich article in the Times. Well, today Atrios linked to this Media Week article that claims that 99.8% of the complaints to the FCC in 2003 came from members in one (yes, one) activist group.

This year, 99.9% through October (after excluding the Janet Jackson fiasco in February)… same group.

While this doesn’t make my case any stronger, it does show that one group in one particular situation having an overwhelming impact on this federal watchdog. This group claims 850,000+ members and aims for a million in this year. Pretty significant group. The interesting thing is that they claim that they have little power:

“I wish we had that much power,” said Lara Mahaney, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles-based group. Mahaney said the issue should not be the source of complaints, but whether programming violates federal law prohibiting the broadcast of indecent matter when children are likely to be watching. “Why does it matter how the complaints come?” Mahaney said. “If the networks haven’t done anything illegal, if they haven’t done anything indecent, why do they care what we say?”

The concern I have is that obscenity guidelines aren’t strict. In other words, there is no definition of what is obscene or what isn’t. What might offend one family may not be offensive to another. One family may consider 9PM to be an OK time to begin sort of PG-13 programming. Another family may not want it on the airwaves at all. The FCC is supposed to use community standards when deciding whether to fine a particular show or not. The question then becomes whether the views of a group of people who at least were concerned enough to “join” this group (not sure how they count members, btw…) are representative of the nation as a whole. Sampling generally works well when the sample is random. This seems far from it to me.

The article is pretty interesting. I’ll pass on one more excerpt which I found interesting:

In such a system, even the number of complaints becomes an object of contention. For example, the agency on Oct. 12, in proposing fines of nearly $1.2 million against Fox Broadcasting and its affiliates, said it received 159 complaints against Married by America, which featured strippers partly obscured by pixilation.

But when asked, the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau said it could find only 90 complaints from 23 individuals. (The smaller total was first reported by Internet-based TV writer Jeff Jarvis; Mediaweek independently obtained the Enforcement Bureau’s calculation.)

And Fox, in a filing last Friday, told the FCC that it should rescind the proposed fines, in part because the low number of complaints fell far short of indicating that community standards had been violated.

“All but four of the complaints were identical…and only one complainant professed even to have watched the program,” Fox said. It said the network and its stations had received 34 comments, “a miniscule total for a show that had a national audience of 5.1 million households.”

Perhaps they should create some software that does similarity checks on complaint letters and groups them if they’re greater than 90% similar?