[unamadreditre]

Cable shows porn on Disney Channel
Press Assoc.
Press Assoc. - Friday, May 4 01:19 pm

A cable television company has launched an investigation after small children ended up watching hardcore porn when they tuned into their favourite cartoon on the Disney Channel.


Paul Dunleavy, a Middletown, New Jersey, subscriber to cable giant Comcast, was stunned on Tuesday morning to find his five-year-old son watching something other than Handy Manny, a cartoon show about a bilingual Latino handyman and his talking tools.

"It was two people doing their thing, it was full-on and it was disgusting," the father-of-three told The New York Daily News.

"I couldn't believe it. We try to do the right thing to protect our kids from this stuff, and then they broadcast it on children's TV."

Comcast spokesman Fred DeAndrea said that the programming error had occurred at around 9.30am on Tuesday. He described it as an "isolated issue in a local New Jersey facility".

"We automatically detected the issue and it was corrected promptly. We apologise to any customer who experienced an issue yesterday morning," said DeAndrea, who said the mistake was made by his company, not Disney.

DeAndrea would not say for how long the pornography was broadcast, how many homes it reached, how the mistake happened and whether anyone would be disciplined.

A Disney Channel spokeswoman said the company has asked Comcast for assurances that appropriate measures were taken to prevent such incidents from happening again.

The state Board of Public Utilities, which regulates the cable industry in New Jersey, has asked to meet Comcast bosses to discuss the matter.

"We value the trust that parents have in our programming and certainly take yesterday's regrettable programme disruption extremely seriously," said Disney Channel's Karen Hobson. "Comcast has taken full responsibility for this situation, and we understand that they are currently working to determine the root cause of the incident."

Link: Porn Played on N.J. Disney Channel: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

[Dopey]

woaw

[tinkerbelle24]

What? I live in NJ and didnt have that problem... Hmmmm I wonder about the dad

[jking84772]

Worst thing about this is that it happened on the Disney Channel! Comcast makes the mistake and Disney will get the blame. ARRRRGGGFHHH...

It's like that latest pervert issue. Cast members behaving badly, ok, Disney can take the heat...some sicko staying at the resort, what can you do?

What a world!

[chastmastr]

Am I the only one who actually finds this hysterically funny? (Re the dad, apparently the Comcast spokesman detected a real problem and corrected it, so it doesn't sound like the father was making something up.)

Of course, Handy Manny has better scriptwriters than most porn, if nothing else...

Perhaps it was a disgruntled Comcast employee...

[Voldemort]

Originally Posted by chastmastr

Am I the only one who actually finds this hysterically funny? (Re the dad, apparently the Comcast spokesman detected a real problem and corrected it, so it doesn't sound like the father was making something up.)

Of course, Handy Manny has better scriptwriters than most porn, if nothing else...

Perhaps it was a disgruntled Comcast employee...

Nope. You're not.

It's unfortunate for the parents, and more than a little awkward for the staff at the location in question who are gonna have a whole lotta 'splainin to do, but it still registers on the funny-meter.

The important thing is that the problem was found and stopped.




Come to think of it, I suspect some parents had some 'splainin to do, too....

[Princessbaby]

All I can say is WOW. I would be livid!

[chastmastr]

Adds new meaning to "educational television" in a rather unexpected way...

[unamadreditre]

I was gonna post something else then thought I better not!

[Dana]

Funny? well it depends. Funny to someone who did not have their 5 year old wathcing hard core porn maybe. Not funny to me and I don't have a 5 year old...we aren't talking about kissing here kids or sexually implied scenes on a TV show...we are talking kink here. I don't think it's funny at all.

[Princessbaby]

Originally Posted by Dana

Funny? well it depends. Funny to someone who did not have their 5 year old wathcing hard core porn maybe. Not funny to me and I don't have a 5 year old...we aren't talking about kissing here kids or sexually implied scenes on a TV show...we are talking kink here. I don't think it's funny at all.

I agree Dana- I have a 5 year old and I don't let them watch anything that is remotely sexually implied-it sends the wrong message and frankly it is something that none of my kids need to see-my 8 yo, my soon to be 6 yo,, or my little DD who would have though nothing of it-because she's young. I can even find the right words to type because it makes me mad-it is not funny-not even in the slightest and I don't think even if I didn't have kids-it would have made me ticked off. We're talking the Disney channel here-a kid safe channel. There was no excuse for that in the slightest bit.

[chastmastr]

*shrug* I guess we're free to disagree about the humor or lack thereof in the situation. (I should also note that at least in the article above, kink isn't even mentioned (not that I believe this should make any kind of difference), but I haven't read anything on this story beyond this thread.) I believe that while Comcast did indeed make a rather dramatic error, the incongruity is still, all other things being equal, humorous. (If it were a movie with extreme, gory violence, or worse a news story showing real-life extreme violence, I would not find it funny at all, and would think the likelihood of something genuinely traumatic or damaging far greater.)

[Dana]

Originally Posted by chastmastr

*shrug* I guess we're free to disagree about the humor or lack thereof in the situation. (I should also note that at least in the article above, kink isn't even mentioned (not that I believe this should make any kind of difference), but I haven't read anything on this story beyond this thread.) I believe that while Comcast did indeed make a rather dramatic error, the incongruity is still, all other things being equal, humorous. (If it were a movie with extreme, gory violence, or worse a news story showing real-life extreme violence, I would not find it funny at all, and would think the likelihood of something genuinely traumatic or damaging far greater.)

We of course we can agree to disagree on the humor here...no biggie. "hard-core" porn to me is kink....just a TERM I use...don't read more into than you have to. I don't judge. . I will reframe from using my own terminology for pornos..lol I would find violence and anything inappropriate for children just as frustrating as this. I don't know why you think hard core porn isn't damaging to a young mind....it's just as damaging as violence etc....you cannot be serious here.

[DisneyTeacher]

I'd be ticked if my son saw something like that on the Disney Channel. I wonder how many homes were sent the wrong show.

[chastmastr]

Er... sorry, but, yes, I am serious. I really do believe that explicit violence, especially real-life violence, is far more potentially damaging, to adults as well as children, than explicit sex. In theory, most adults (not all, of course) will become sexually active themselves at some time in their lives (otherwise, there would be no children in the first place), which is a far more explicit experience than watching it in a film, and they generally seem to like it; but most people hope to avoid serious real-life violence altogether. While some people might have emotional traumas from failed romances, they are more likely, I suggest, to have much deeper emotional traumas from an experience of violence (being mugged, shot at, robbed, attacked in general) than anything consensual in the bedroom.

We now in our time and place have the luxury of privacy to a degree unparalleled in human history. But in the past, when an entire family shared a very small living space, not even to mention what children growing up on a farm might see the animals do, children have been exposed far sooner to the realities of sex than they have been in our society in recent decades. To the best of my knowledge, this did not (in itself) do our ancestors any harm. Some of our notions of what childhood is supposed to be, when it ends, etc. are particularly modern. I'm inclined to think that an average young child (who has no context for what they're seeing, and I'm thinking of the "opposite sex has cooties" stage rather than someone on the brink of adolescence) is more likely to be baffled, possibly even bored, by seeing a depiction of explicit sex, whereas they will understand someone being hurt or dying and find it much more disturbing, having nightmares, etc.

It could even be argued that what would make a porn film (however suitable adults might find it) inappropriate for children is not as much that it depicts sex, but that it depicts sex without consequences, whether pregnancy, emotional connections and conflicts, etc. which anyone growing up in, say, a communal tribal hut would have observed on a day-to-day basis.

As far as humor goes, finding sex humorous is pretty much one of those universal human things for as far back as history goes, far older than Shakespeare or Chaucer, but to explain in detail why the incongruity of "expectation of children's programming + unexpected porn = funny" (which Monty Python, for example, has used to good effect in at least one sketch) makes sense to me would not so much be inappropriately explicit, but tediously dry and dull. "Poor Aphrodite!" as C.S. Lewis once said. "They have sandpapered most of the Homeric laughter off her face."

Er. Now that somehow I've wandered as far afield as Homer, I should probably finish the post...

David