Dorgan has tried to make the case that further media consolidation is related to growing indecency because large conglomerates can be out of touch with community standards.
Dorgan drew the ire of the Parents Television Council, which fought to raise the fines.
"The issue of media ownership is a poison pill when it is attached to indecency because the House has refused to even consider any bill that has media ownership attached to it," L. Brent Bozell, president of the Parents Television Council, said in a statement.
"Senator Dorgan has been a stalwart partner in the fight against indecency," Bozell said. "Yet today his selfish actions have undermined months -- in fact, years -- of progress on this issue by refusing to withdraw his media ownership provision in the [authorization] bill."
FCC Chairman Michael K. Powell asked Congress to increase the agency's power to fine broadcasters to create a deterrent to airing indecent material. FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps said the current fines are only the "cost of doing business" to billion-dollar conglomerates such as Viacom Inc., which owns the CBS television network, 39 television stations and more than 200 radio stations through its Infinity Broadcasting subsidiary.
In September, the FCC fined the 20 CBS-owned stations $27,500 each for a total of $550,000 for the Super Bowl incident, which the agency ruled was indecent. By FCC rules, radio and television stations cannot broadcast sexual or scatological material between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., when children are most likely to be watching. No such rules apply to cable and satellite television and radio stations.
While supporting the higher fines, Dorgan and others on the Hill have continued their fight against the FCC's media ownership rules, which were returned to the agency for reconsideration by a federal court in June, with the court saying the FCC had not adequately justified the new rules. Some of the new rules would relax media ownership, allowing the same company to own a newspaper and television station in the same city, while others tightened ownership limits on radio stations.
Dorgan fears that if FCC appeals the court's ruling and wins, the new rules could be adopted.
He wants them thrown out in their entirety and has been fighting them since their June 2003 adoption by the FCC. Attaching language to the indecency fines legislation was his latest strategy.
