PBS watches its mouth rather than pay big fines.(Richard Dreyfuss is mad)

[Kadie]

PBS watches its mouth rather than pay big fines. Now it's up to the other networks to fight the FCC.
3 no-nos bleeped from new crime drama -- Richard Dreyfuss blasts government censorship

Tim Goodman
Monday, July 12, 2004

Los Angeles -- And the morality war on television has begun.
With the excising of three not-so-little terms -- "s -- ," "f -- " and "blow job," -- from a forthcoming drama on PBS, the Hollywood creative community and broadcasters are finding, not to their liking, that a chilling effect on content has already taken place.

snip...
Unlike other broadcast networks, however, PBS doesn't have a lot of cash sitting around. In fact, the considerable woes now facing PBS are almost directly tied to money -- the system simply can't afford to stand up against the government.

Because of this, a new drama called "Cop Shop" starring Richard Dreyfuss and other actors who made a sort of creative labor of love on the cheap for public broadcasting, has been edited to avoid the potential wrath of the FCC. The cuts prompted executive producer and writer David Black and Dreyfuss to whip out prepared statements before facing the nation's TV critics here on Friday.

"Ladies and gentlemen, 'Cop Shop' was never meant to be bleeped," said Dreyfuss, reading from his prepared statement, via satellite from New York where he's appearing on Broadway. "David and I agreed to be bleeped because we were told that KCET, our greatly appreciated allies in this affair, could be subject to intimidating fines in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. ... And so, more reluctantly than I can describe, we agreed to be bleeped. But being bleeped is more than it is cracked up to be. Having now been bleeped, I can only say that it doesn't feel very good. It feels kind of dirty. But you can never be unbleeped, so you can only learn from your bleeps and move on."

more... http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/07/12/DDGHK7JE0V1.DTL