WASHINGTON -- Gloria Tristani doesn't exactly dislike nudity on TV.
The FCC commissioner hates it.
Over the last few months, Tristani, a Clinton appointee, has waged a one-woman campaign at the FCC to rid the nation's airwaves of anything she deems "indecent."
Tristani has previously suggested that radio talk show hosts using the word "piss" on the air should be punished, in addition to -- look out, Howard Stern! -- on-the-air chatter that mentions certain anatomical parts.
Now she's irate over a brief glimpse of bare skin that WTXF-TV of Philadelphia allegedly aired in January.
In a statement this week, Tristani condemned the FCC for dismissing a complaint against the TV station because Cherie Degnan of Ambler, Pennsylvania, failed to include a videotape of the allegedly indecent broadcast.
"Since Ms. Degnan's complaint appears to describe the televised broadcast of 'sexual organs' -- in her words 'full frontal male and female nudity' -- during the time of day when indecent broadcasting is prohibited, it is certainly possible that the (enforcement) bureau would have found an indecency violation," Tristani said.
She said: "Courts have affirmed the Commission's ban on the broadcast of 'material that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory activities or organs.'"
----
Mastercard satire ... priceless: Mastercard lawyers are threatening the Attrition.org hacker site for a parody of the company's Priceless campaign.
In e-mail to the site's operators, Mastercard's attorneys complained: "You have posted and are distributing, at the http://www.attrition.org Web address, material that infringes the MasterCard Priceless Advertisements and that further infringes MasterCard's Priceless Mark." They warned of unspecified "legal action" in the not-so-distant future.
Turns out Attrition.org hosts a few dozen JPG files that include hilarious parodies of the Mastercard advertising campaign.
Attrition.org wrote back saying the parodies were protected under the First Amendment: "Quit wasting both of our time. Quit harassing our upstream provider who has no control over the content of this site. Quit sending us vague threats of legal action without clearly documenting what you find objection to. Quit demanding immediate replies to mail when you refuse to show the same courtesy to me."
Charles Arthur, a well-spoken writer for The Independent newspaper, offered this suggestion:
Cost of searching for "priceless" and "image" on Google ... $0.00002
Cost of sending lawyernastysnailmail to nonexistent P.O. Box for attrition.org ... $1,594.32 (including bathroom break).
Cost of sending lawyernastyemail with snailmail as Word to attrition.org ... $0.34 (no bathroom break).
Cost of bugging attrition.org and its users and getting spread all around Politech and interesting-people and who knows where ... PRICELESS.
Monkeyfishing.com: Ever hear of monkeyfishing?
Jay Forman wrote about this purported sport in a Slate article on June 7, saying that somewhat-sadistic fishermen in Florida entertained themselves by using apples on hooks to catch rhesus monkeys.
After Inside.com and The New York Times questioned the truthfulness of Forman's account, an embarrassed Michael Kinsley retracted the article and apologized to his readers on June 25.
Now the term's been expropriated by a merry band of D.C. muckrakers for a new website, monkeyfishing.com, which they plan to use to keep the media honest.
"A lot of it is going to be straight commentary from a libertarian perspective," says Jerry Brito, the site's cofounder. Brito works at the Cato Institute during the day and he previously founded now-defunct Liberzine.com.
Says Brito: "Hopefully if this becomes a little more popular, people can start sending us stories they find along the way."
----
Thuggish cops: Police in Key West, Florida, arrested a newspaper editor last week for printing an article that criticized an internal police investigation.
The editor of Key West The Newspaper, Dennis Cooper, is being prosecuted for allegedly violating a state law. Under Florida law, it's a crime to disclose information about a police investigation -- even if you're the person who had filed a complaint alleging police wrongdoing, as Cooper seems to have done.
Cooper's site was offline earlier in the week, but, as usual, the Net community pitched in and mirrored copies of some of his articles that criticized the local cops.
A disturbing side note: According to a report in the Miami Herald, the police knew some judges had ruled this law was unconstitutional before they charged Cooper with violating it.
