Some North Carolina toddlers whose parents subscribe to Time Warner Cable television got a surprise recently when they tuned in to the Kids On Demand Preschool channels. Instead of promos for SpongeBob SquarePants, they saw nude women from the Playboy Channel dishing dirt about sex.

The Raleigh-Durham Time Warner official interviewed by WRAL TV apologized, abashed that not only did porn appear for about two hours on the kid's channel, but that its technicians took a good portion of that time to fix the problem. And worse, the problem had happened before and the company was confident it had put safeguards in place. Apparently, they still aren't practicing safe broadcasting.
This was not, sadly, a singular event. In 2007, Comcast broadcast porn to kids in New Jersey who had tuned in the Disney Network. Last year, Arizona viewers of the Super Bowl had their show interrupted with 30 seconds of the Club Jenna channel.

With the Internet, we've become perhaps too complacent about living surrounded by a cloud of porn. In 2006 the industry was estimated at $13.33 billion in the U.S. alone, and cable television operators have taken in their fair share on the flesh trade. And even though a USA Today writer recently reported the "industry is in a tailspin" (pun intended, I presume), cable TV operators don't seem interested in taking the easy route to heading off any program transposition problems -- cut out those channels altogether.