The Palm Beach Post Reports The Bush administration has decided that people with bad hearing have bad judgment, too, and need special guidance from the federal government.
So the U.S. Department of Education is declaring about 200 television programs inappropriate for closed-captioning and denying federal grant requests to make them accessible to the hearing-impaired. The government is refusing to caption Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, apparently fearing that the deaf would fall prey to witchcraft if they viewed the classic sitcoms.
Censorship of neofascist skullduggery?
I wouldn’t call this censorship just yet, but I will certainly state unequivocally that it violates open government laws.
That a “panel” was never empanelled but consulted individually and that at least one individual was never told the purpose of his being consulted certainly weighs heavily in favour of censorship, however. This coffin will take another nail or two before I can decide for sure, though.
NAD
More on the subject from the National Association of the Deaf website.