A read of that Obama campaign page is not encouraging: "Obama values our First Amendment freedoms and our right to artistic expression and does not view regulation as the answer to these concerns. An Obama administration will give parents the tools and information they need to control what their children see on television and the Internet in ways fully consistent with the First Amendment."

That sounds almost exactly like the broadcasters and the cable industry, who want to put all the responsibility and all of the blame for sleazy TV on parents who haven't utilized all the supposed "tools" that have been put in their hands to monitor and block the gunk that Hollywood makes.

Sen. Obama spoke out at a Kaiser Foundation forum on Nov. 9, 2005, asking, "What do we do when bad television becomes the enemy of good parenting?" He spoke for most Americans when he said, "You can talk to the most liberal Democratic parent and First Amendment absolutist, and they will still cringe when they see some of the programming that's on television today."

If Obama is as smart as the adoring media constantly says he is, then he knows full well that the current V-chip and the self-selected content ratings used to block programming have been proven to be wildly inaccurate and ineffective.

The closest Obama came to frustrating the TV programmers in this Kaiser address was insisting that the cable companies could develop technology to "make it possible for parents to create their own family tier just by programming their television (to block entire channels, or genres of channels) ... There's no reason the industry can't make it as easy to find family-friendly television as it is to program TiVo. But if the industry fails to act -- if it fails to give parents advanced controls and new choices -- Congress will."

Congress did act in 2006 to pass the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which increased the maximum fine for indecency tenfold. That wasn't a technological fix, but a bigger hammer for the FCC -- if, and only if, it decided to enforce indecency violations. We don't know whether Obama favored it, since it cleared the Senate without a roll-call vote, but it passed the House by a whopping 379 to 35, so one might expect a senator aspiring to be president would have voted Yes.

Senators need to ask Mr. Genachowski if he will genuinely and publicly pressure broadcasters and cable chieftains to shape up, since even Obama knows almost everyone is disgusted to sit in front of the TV with their children? Will he at least give the public the ability to stop funding wretched channels if they want? And will he enforce indecency with fines -- as he has been mandated by law to do -- or remove all the watchdog's teeth and let it sleep on the porch?