Axxlog

I admit to having been somewhat asleep at the switch on this one, but now that it’s getting some attention, I can provide historical background. You realize this is the third time it’s come up, right? The ghost of Baywatch haunts us still, primarily by appearing on Jerry Springer to plug its tell-all memoir.

The U.S. Department of Education has apparently decided that certain programming will receive sponsorship for captioning and certain other programming will not. DoEd has funded captioning since at least the late 1970s – The Captioned ABC News, which I watched (now almost notoriously) in my pyjamas as a young fella, was partly funded by DoEd, for example.

Current online coverage:

• “Censor Scooby-Doo? Words fail” (mentioned here already)
• “Small decision illuminates big ones”: “Here’s an unpublished government decision made in concert with unnamed individuals and only made public through the efforts of a nonprofit advocacy group”
• Neil Gaiman (does he watch captioning?)
• National Association of the Deaf press releases and backgrounders (from way back in October 2003):
  • “Television Captioning Censorship Hurts Family Values” (very much an unfortunate choice of words)
  • “NAD Applauds NCD Opposition to Captioning Censorship”
    • Letter from NCD to DoEd chair
  • Lists of approved and rejected shows

This is a rehash of a couple of scares that began in 1996.

1. First people were upset that DoEd sponsored captioning of that masterpiece of “educational” television, Baywatch (1996).
2. Later, some were shocked and appalled that Jerry Springer’s captioning was sponsored and wanted that funding pulled (1998). The case was argued that – to use my own words – deaf people and captioning viewers have the right to watch the same trash as everybody else.
3. U.S legislation to take effect in 2001 (IDEA – PDF or text) would have solely restricted DoEd to funding the captioning of programming deemed “educational, news, and informational.” In 1999, DoEd canvassed for public opinion on the topic of “what the term ‘educational, news, and informational’ encompasses in reference to the description and captioning of television, videos, and materials.”

I can’t find any information about what happened between that point in 1999 and late 2003, when the now-notorious accepted and banned lists were put together.

A few issues people aren’t talking about

1. DoEd grants, if memory serves, pay for only half the cost. You’d think this would result in twice as much total captioning, but I see no evidence of that whatsoever. Supremely popular TV series (yes, including Baywatch and Jerry Springer) that earn tons of money for producers are overrepresented in the history of DoEd funding. I have no evidence at hand that producers double the number of series they caption with DoEd funding. Instead, it simply reduces their costs. (And for producers with a single show on the go at any given time – the norm for mom-’n’-pop producers – the money, if only in the form of cost deferment, is pure gravy.)
2. Moreover, DoEd funding represents a gravy train for captioning agencies.
   1. CaptionMax, Vitac, WGBH, Caption Colorado, and NCI list DoEd funding, for example, though funding may not be current.
   2. As the FCC delicately put it, “Historically, there appears to have been a heavy reliance on federal funding of closed captioning and video description, particularly through U.S. Department of Education grants.” It’s a teat they are reluctant to wean themselves from.
   3. Remember, not all the grant money goes toward actual captioning; there’s also “administration” involved.
   4. And no matter who pays for the captioning or in what ratio, these are businesses earning money off the service. Margins are reportely quite tight with some of the nonprofit captioners, but that is not necessarily the case with the for-profit shops.
3. In the current list of disapproved shows, I can spot only a couple whose producers might genuinely be too poor to pay for captioning, and the only one I think is really too poor for it is In the Life (captioned this year by WGBH, previously by NCI). Clouding this argument is the fact that the shows are so skimpily described that I have not heard of many of them, which is as you would expect, as these are grants dealing with future programming.
4. Furthermore, there is no requirement that highest-quality captioning be used. I have a vague memory, but cannot point to examples, of DoEd-funded reality-TV shows that should have been captioned via pop-on or at worst by live display that were done by real-time captioning instead. (The one I have in mind is Blind Date, but I’m gonna have to look that up.)
5. It is at best debatable that captioning needs to be supported by government grants, something I’ve been saying since 1996.
   1. Is captioning still merely an added feature, something we do if we feel like it or if somebody else is willing to pony up half the cost?
   2. Why are people still pretending that an inaccessible program is the true underlying form, while captioning and description are extraneous and discretionary supplementary features?
6. If hundreds of other shows are captioned without DoEd funding, how important is it anymore? We have nothing like it in Canada, for example, yet we have proportionately more captioning on Canadian programs than the U.S. does on its own.
7. TV is expensive; captioning has been around for 30 years (closed captioning for 25); it’s possible find adequate captioning at reasonable rates, shitty captioning at fantastic rates, and very good captioning at high rates.
8. Nobody seems to be asking if similar lists have been compiled for audio-described programming. Described TV is still in its infancy a mere 15 years after it began, and it’s much more expensive than captioning. I can see a weak argument for government funding of description. In fact, I would not severely object if only description were funded.
9. Likewise, a separate program to caption (often open-caption) educational videos that are unlikely ever to be broadcast makes sense to me, as long as those or similar videos are also described. The Captioned Media Program is administered by NAD and funded by the Department of Education ($17.25 million from 2001–2006), a conflict of interest its Web pages on the current contretemps do not bother to mention.
10. A denial of sponsorship for captioning is not “censorship,” as the NAD hysterically claims, and for the love of God, it has nothing to do with “family values.” Reduced funding may contribute to a denial of accessibility, but it does not prevent the show producers from expressing themselves.

More news as it develops. But in the meantime, if you are a resident of the United States, ask yourself this: Do you want the government of the day approving and rejecting television programming in the first place?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2004 at 15:11 and is filed under Captioning, News roundup. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.