WRAZ, a Fox affiliate in the
Raleigh-Durham area, refused to broadcast future episodes of the series following the premiere of the second episode. The affiliate claimed that they contacted Fox to express their concerns over the series' concept, in which they stated that it "demeans and exploits the institution of marriage."
FCC fine In the penultimate episode of
Married by America, the contestants were thrown
Bachelor and
Bachelorette parties that featured
strippers. At the parties, some contestants were depicted licking whipped cream off the body of a stripper while another contestant, who was only wearing underwear, was spanked by two strippers. While some of the strippers were topless, all nudity was
pixelated. The sexual nature of the scenes received fierce backlash from the
media monitoring organization the
Parents Television and Media Council. Over a year after the show's cancellation, the
FCC fined Fox a record $1.2 million claiming that the episode violated the FCC's decency laws. The ruling underwent great scrutiny when
blogger
Jeff Jarvis uncovered that although the FCC originally claimed to have received 159 complaints, it later admitted to only receiving 90, which came from only 23 people. Jarvis studied the complaints and determined that all but two were
virtually identical to each other, meaning that the $1.2 million judgment was based on original complaints written by a total of only three people. The fine was reduced to $91,000 in January 2009. On September 21, 2012, the
United States Department of Justice dismissed the lawsuit. ==References==