Have you received an email (or snail mail) which says that the FCC is planning to disallow all religious programming from radio and TV because of a petition by Madalyn Murray O'Hare?
This is one of many 'hoax' emails being constantly circulated on the Internet.
It was based on the fact that 25 years ago, in the 1970's, two people (the famous atheist was not one of them) did file a petition to remove religious programming from radio and TV. The FCC quickly denied the petition because it was against the 1st amendment.
Since then, however, the FCC has been constantly hit with letters (evidently this hoax circulated in snail mail as well as email) begging them to keep religious programming.
The hoax has generated so much response that the FCC offers religious petition as one of the options you can select with your touch-tone phone when calling the agency's consumer switchboard. That triggers a recorded message declaring that the rumors are absolutely false. The agency has received more than 30 million pieces of mail on the subject, and has worked to advise the public that the rumor is not true.
In 1996, FCC spokesperson Maureen Peratino said that despite repeated efforts to kill the rumor, it remains alive and well. "It holds steady," she said. "We receive a couple million pieces of mail each year. Our consumer assistance office handles anywhere from 200 to 300 phone calls a month on this."
There isn't a petition to ban religious broadcasting, and no such petition would have a chance of succeeding, she added.As Time magazine reported a couple of years ago,
"One day in August 1995, Madalyn, then 76, along with Jon, 40, and Robin, 30, vanished from the house on Greystone Drive, reportedly with breakfast still cooking, and were never seen again." Evidently, several hundred thousand dollars of American Atheists, Inc. funds vanished at the same time, leading to all sorts of speculation as to the fate of O'Hair, her family, and the money.
Most of the things floating around the Web are hoaxes. There are many sites where you can check out weird or scary e-mails. Here are three:
Recently someone who found out something they sent was a hoax commented "like we have so much spare time to mess with these!". That's it in a nutshell. Hoax forwards are a waste of time for everyone. And the reason the same ones keep coming back to haunt us is that people don't research forwards before sending them out. With forwards, a good rule of thumb may be, if in doubt, don't send.
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