Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
By Associated PressGovernment cuts leave some programs uncaptioned.
NEW YORK - The U.S. Education Department has cut the money for captioning about 200 TV programs, citing a 1997 mandate from Congress only to pay for captioning of "educational, news and informational" programming.
"The department wants to ensure that over 28-million deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals are not exposed to any non-puritan programming - never mind that the rest of the country may be allowed to be exposed to such," said Kelby Brick, associate executive director of the National Association of the Deaf.
The federal government distributes about $12-million a year in grants for captioning and video description services, said Louis Danielson, head of the federal special education program that supervises captioning.
Advocates concede that many of the programs that were cut off, such as Pokemon cartoons, Disney children's movies or football games, aren't educational.
But these kind of shows help deaf children "learn about the trends, culture and society around them," said Nancy Bloch, executive director of the National Council on Disability.
The vast majority of the affected shows are either on cable networks or PBS, with most of the broadcast network fare being sports. Few first-run, broadcast network prime-time shows are affected; CBS, for instance, says the network or producer pays to caption all of its prime-time programs anyway.
Among the shows cut off from government funds: MTV's Cribs, Disney Channel's Lizzie McGuire, reruns of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Fox's Malcolm in the Middle.
But along with CBS, Fox also said that it's picking up the cost to keep its programs captioned, and Nickelodeon is paying to keep children's programs such as Rugrats and Fairly OddParents captioned.
The federal government has been setting aside money to caption programming for many years, said Robert Davila, a member of the National Council on Disability. In 1991, federal law required all TV sets larger than 13 inches sold in the United States to have built-in decoders to display captions, freeing deaf people from buying their own equipment.
By 2006, federal regulations will require that the vast majority of all programming have captioning, with the burden placed on the TV industry to pay for it, Davila said.
Until then, there are gaps in what's being captioned.
In addition to deaf viewers, captions are also used by people who are learning to speak English and on televisions in noisy places such as health clubs, said the National Council on Disability.