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Syllabus
judge a program's value through the company it keeps or refrain from subscribing to the segregated channel out of fear that the operator will disclose its subscriber list. Moreover, § 10(b) is not appropriately tailored to achieve its basic, legitimate objective of protecting children from exposure to "patently offensive" materials. Less restrictive means utilized by Congress elsewhere to protect children from "patently offensive" sexual material broadcast on cable channels indicate that § 10(b) is overly restrictive while its benefits are speculative. These include some provisions of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which utilizes blocking without written request, "V-chips," and other significantly less restrictive means, and the "lockbox" requirement that has been in place since the Cable Act of 1984. Pp. 753-760.
Justice Breyer, joined by Justice Stevens, Justice O'Connor, and Justice Souter, concluded in Parts I and II that § 10(a) is consistent with the First Amendment. Pp. 737-753. (a) Close scrutiny demonstrates that § 10(a) properly addresses a serious problem without imposing, in light of the relevant competing interests, an unnecessarily great restriction on speech. First, the section comes accompanied with the extremely important child-protection justification that this Court has often found compelling. See, e. g., Sable Communications of Cal., Inc. v. FCC, 492 U. S. 115, 126. Second, § 10(a) arises in a very particular context—congressional permission for cable operators to regulate programming that, but for a previous Act of Congress, would have had no path of access to cable channels free of an operator's control. The First Amendment interests involved are therefore complex, and require a balance between those interests served by the access requirements themselves (increasing the availability of avenues of expression to programmers who otherwise would not have them), see H. R. Rep. No. 98-934, pp. 31-36, and the disadvantage to the First Amendment interests of cable operators and other programmers (those to whom the operator would have assigned the channels devoted to access). See Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. v. FCC, 512 U. S. 622, 635-637. Third, the problem § 10(a) addresses is analogous to the "indecent" radio broadcasts at issue in FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U. S. 726, and the balance Congress struck here is commensurate with the balance the Court approved in that case. Fourth, § 10(a)'s permissive nature means that it likely restricts speech less than, not more than, the ban at issue in Pacifica. The importance of the interest at stake here—protecting children from exposure to patently offensive depictions of sex; the accommodation of the interests of programmers in maintaining access channels and of cable operators in editing the contents of their channels; the similarity of the problem and its solution to those at issue in Pacifica; and the flexibility inherent in an approach
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