How the Ass Hats Are Winning

From today's Studio Briefing at IMDB:

News footage shot for the PBS series Frontline in Afghanistan (Return of the Taliban, showing on October 3) in which soldiers use four-letter expletives have been cut in two upcoming episodes, the New York Observer reported Wednesday. "It's a really sorry state of affairs if we're Disney-fying combat," writer-producer Martin Smith told the weekly. His words were echoed by Frontline's executive producer Louis Wiley Jr., who remarked, "What I fear, really, is that we're on the verge of making some of our best material less forceful, less powerful. ... You get into a situation where we're all going to be looking not to what is the best choice editorially for what we publish, but what is this government agency going to do to us? They get us to do the censorship ourselves. They use a huge cudgel. They threaten everyone with these draconian fines, and they don't have to do anything. It accomplishes the same end."