Mel Karmazin will forever have Janet Jackson's nipple in his mind

Former Viacom number 2 Mel Karmazin is no stranger to conflict. However Mr. Karmazin isn't afraid to take on challenges he and/or his company Sirius faces. He doesn't apologize for the major money deals he's done since becoming CEO of Sirius but he seems to still be traumatized about the whole Janet Jackson nipple thing. Mel sat down with Broadcasting & Cable for a Q&A: Has the government gone too far? Yes. I think the government is causing more harm to America than a view of Janet Jackson's top for two-tenths of a second. Anything you want to say about Janet Jackson? Yes. She should not have done it, and I certainly wish she hadn't done it. It was terribly inappropriate that she did it. Our investigation indicated that nobody from our company [CBS] knew anything about it; we were blindsided. I apologized to Congress, and I apologized to our audience. But that said, the government should not be fining for anything. I've been looking at any studies that may have been done on the youth of America since they were exposed to that two-tenths of a second, and it's hard for me to find any harm that has been caused. I think there'll be a lot of harm caused by this new indecency law, because it is, in fact, going to censor people.These fines are so big that small broadcasters just can't risk paying them, and, therefore, they'll just totally stay away from this type of content. As I understand it, the government isn't saying you can't cover any kind of content, but, if you're going to set fines that are so great, people are just going to shy away from it.I think the industry did a horrible job in using its political capital. In walking the halls of Congress, I know that, when broadcasters want something to happen, they do a pretty good of lobbying. On this subject of decency, I guess people just don't care that much about it. And now there's lip service talking about, yeah, we're going fight it in the courts and things like that. But I don't think there is as great an effort speaking out for free speech as there once was on the part of broadcasters. read...(B&C)