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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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Session:         Page of 755

Between now and then you're going to be sorting out maybe twenty channels to get to those five.

You just can't sit down and take the time to go through all the channels that you can get on your receiver, and there is some pretty sorry stuff on the channels anyway. But if you'regoing to have an open society you can't start saying: “Well, this is okay and this isn't okay.” That's going to be one of the problems that I think cable is going to face, because if you and I can each get on a cable channel and do whatever we want to do in terms of quality or program material, if you're going to have pornography on one channel and nudity on another channel--not that the two are exclusive--but if you're going to have poor quality programming and it's going to get to the point where it might get the back of Congress up and they're going to say, “We ought to pass a law,” then you walk in to real trouble because I think you're in trouble with the First Amendment, and the freedom of the press might be impaired as a result of cable. You think of it in terms of it being the other way around, that with 500 channels you've got freedom to do anything you want to do, and that's fine except that some people abuse it and don't use it responsibly, and there's some pretty low quality stuff on the air today. I stumbled in to something the other night on one channel--I've forgotten, thirty something--and, you know, I wouldn't have believed what I was seeing except that there it was. These were live people, most of them nude. I just believe that the conservative part of the Republican party, and certainly the Southern part of the Democratic party, will say: “We don't want that kind of thing coming in to our homes.” Now they can control that, but they would much prefer not to allow anybody to see it instead of just controlling it in their own home, and that raises some real problems.

There's another problem I think that the news people face. With technology you can change





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