'Fox News Porn' Content Banned

Man, this is a funny story, and it sums up beautifully what's wrong with media consolidation, and proves many of the points raised in the articles I've done this week on Brave New Films, Fox News, and Rudy Giuliani. Brave New Films did a funny, satirical website called Fox News Porn. You can see the video below, but go to the site, too; it's really funny.

The video from the site is all footage that was originally broadcast on Fox News. The site went up today, and Digg suspended Brave New Films for inappropriate content! Was this just an overzealous, lower level staffer who got fooled by the parodic trappings of BNF's site? It's still a funny story. Was it something else, like the fact that Digg has in the past, and is rumored to currently be, in acquisition talks with News Corp, according to this story from CNet News? Not so funny anymore.

Update: See the Countdown segment on the next page.

Update: 5:38 pm 11/16/07 I just got this from Brave New Films:

"oh my god.. the CREATOR of digg just posted this.. they apologized! i'm blown away..

Hey everyone, we temporarily banned this last night. We flagged it as a potential TOS violation, but after looking into it further we promptly unbanned it. Our fault. Digg on. -Kevin"

Update: 4:45 pm 11/06/07 Apparently, the material is being blocked on Youtube for viewers under 18. I called Fox News for a statement this morning, they have not gotten back to me yet. I got this statement in an email from Robert Greenwald this afternoon:

"Fox News Porn has now been banned by Digg and blocked for minors on YouTube. Yet it's made up completely of footage that has been piped into millions of American homes by FOX News. We thought we were doing parody, but apparently, according to Digg and YouTube, FOX News literally IS pornography. We're asking people to call FOX's local advertisers and let them know the truth about FOX News."

Digg has since reinstated Brave New Films' Digg account, but has permanently banned the Fox News Porn video. Do they really think the content is that obscene? Remember, all of it made it past Fox's Standards and Practices guys, if they even exist.

Fox News did not return any of my calls for comment today, but I'll try again tomorrow. They did release a statement to Radaronline that sort of belies their positioning as paragons of decency, but I admire their moxy. "Can you quote us as so not giving a sh*t?"

Now, to be honest, a senior BNF staffer contacted me about this story, and I was a little leery of covering this. It didn't sound at first blush like a big enough deal, considering that I've done three stories on Brave New Films this week alone. The guy was apoplectic about Digg banning them, and the video, and all I could think was, "This is exactly what I tried to warn Robert Greenwald about in our interview."

See, Greenwald is trying to prod the FCC into action by using "decency" as the impetus for new cable regulations. This story highlights what can go wrong when you wake up the idiot with the black magic marker. I'm positive that BNF never expected to be banned from Digg, indeed they should not have been, but that was the unintended consequence.

I do believe that he brushed off the concern out of an honest conviction that his hairsplitting between decency and choice isn't hairsplitting at all. I see this as a failure of imagination on his part.

You can read more about the Digg/News Corp relationship and the banning here, but here's a quote from the piece that I love:

As I write this, the submission "The Top 20 'Side Boobs' of All-Time [Kinda NSFW]", a completely gratuitous web site with adult content, is #4 on digg.

Now, that's funny. I gotta check that site out.

Here's the Countdown segment on Digg's banishment of BNF: