The FCC should tighten its process for accepting...

received numerous complaint letters at many of its owned stations about an episode of Family Guy that it says were generated by a “complaint mill” rather than by actual viewers. Though the letters in question appeared to come from viewers at 16 different addresses, they were all mailed from the same Miami post office, and many of the apparent return addresses don’t exist, Fox said. “Advocates have begun to undertake elaborate ruses that manipulate the FCC’s processes and deceive the Commission into believing that numerous complaints have been filed from numerous communities even if in reality they originate from a single source at a single location,” Fox said. The “scheme” undermines the credibility of the complaint process, Fox said, and “leaves the Commission constitutionally unable to fulfill its promise to maintain a restrained enforcement policy.” Because the allegedly fake filings throw doubt on the others, the FCC should dismiss any pending complaints against Fox based on the episode of Family Guy, Fox said. Fox’s filing is “a calculated effort to re-litigate the U.S. Supreme Court cases that they lost and to circumvent the law rather than obey it,” said Parents Television Council Director of Communications and Policy Dan Isset. The episode of Family Guy contained “explicit jokes about rape, molestation and sexual exploitation of children,” said PTC. Though Isset said defective complaints should be dismissed by the FCC, he said Fox hadn’t shown that all complaints were defective. “In no case does Fox assert that all of the several hundred thousand pending indecency complaints are in any way defective, yet bizarrely suggests the FCC should ignore all of them without review,” said Isset.