Supreme Court to Hear FCC Indecency Case

MachineShedFred writes "The Supreme Court of the United States has announced that it will be hearing the FCC's appeal to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' decision that the FCC has changed its policy on fleeting expletives without adequate explanation. It's now on the FCC to explain to the Supreme Court why its policy has changed. This is also the first time the Supreme Court has heard a major 'broadcast indecency' case in 30 years."

Comments

In other news

[gnick]

FTA:

Solicitor General Paul Clement ... argued that the decision "places the commission in an untenable position," powerless to stop the airing of expletives even when children are watching. Airing violent murders when children are watching? Still OK.

Re:In other news

[sgt.greywar]

Inconsistency is our watchword. Also incompetance.

Re:In other news

[explosivejared]

Well sensible parents would take care of their children and regulate what they watch. They would also discuss with their children the things they saw on tv and try to make the children understand the distinctions between the real world and fantasy. They would not rely on the, as my libertarian friend so lovingly calls it, the nanny-state to tell them what is ok for other people put on the air in front of children.

So in a situation that doesn't even have to be perfect, the whole premise of indecency is moot.

Lot's of people complain about neocons, or corporations, or illegal immigrants, or terrorists, or deviants ruining our country. They are so far off. Unfit and downright harmful parents are far worse.

Re:In other news

[gnick]

What, your TV doesn't have a v-chip? Actually it doesn't... But, I do have a superior system in place - Administrative controls. My kids are allowed to watch what I tell them they're allowed to watch. They have no televisions in their rooms and they'll have to get significantly more tech-savvy if they want to defeat the logging on my DVR. There's nothing technologically stopping from watching anything coming in, but we'd certainly have a chat about it if it was something objectionable.

Technology obviated the need for "decency timeslots" a long time ago...if only parents would use it. I'd say that an obligation to parent responsibly should have superseded the need for "decency timeslots" from square one. Just my opinion...

Re:In other news

[morgan_greywolf]

Definitely. Such administrative controls can also be used to get children to 1) do their homework, 2) do their chores (aka "assigned tasks"), 3) eat their vegetables, and/or 4) go outside and get some fresh air before the TV can even be turned on.

It's called parenting. When I was growing up, there were no technological controls available. We didn't have TVs in our bedrooms, and we were only allowed to watch what we were told we were allowed to watch. You watch something else and you were going to get yourself into trouble.

The bottom line is that if you need technology to control what you're kids are watching -- you are doing something wrong.

Re:In other news

[blueg3]

Certainly true. To an extent, though, the purpose of these regulations such as those the FCC enforces (and those that various cable networks self-enforce) are to supply parents with information about programming they're not already familiar with. I suppose some parents view it as "too late" if their children accidentally see something unexpected on television (such as, for example, cooking and serving a human placenta on a daytime food show). Of course, this doesn't apply to programming that you're already familiar with and that has a consistent quality. (I'd mostly be concerned about younger children, and children's programming certainly falls into this category.)

I don't agree with that mindset -- incidental exposure isn't too damaging -- but the FCC regulations aren't entirely intended simply to prevent children from viewing objectionable content while removing the need from parental supervision.

Re:In other news

[sm62704]

"What, your TV doesn't have a v-chip?" No, but my hand certainly has a "back".

I don't know where this originated, but the Bellamy Brothers have a very similar song that Google can't seem to find the lyrics to.

I had a drug problem when I was young: I was drug to church on Sunday morning. I was drug to church for weddings and funerals. I was drug to family reunions and community socials no matter the weather.

I was drug by my ears when I was disrespectful to adults. I was also drug to the woodshed when I disobeyed my parents, told a lie, brought home a bad report card, did not speak with respect, spoke ill of the teacher or the preacher. Or if I didn't put forth my best effort in everything that was asked of me. I was drug to the kitchen sink to have my mouth washed out with soap if I uttered a profane four letter word. I was drug out to pull weeds in mom's garden and flower beds and cockleburs
out of dad's fields.

I was drug to the homes of family, friends, and neighbors to help out some poor soul who had no one to mow the yard, repair the clothesline or chop some fire wood. And if my mother had ever known that I took a single dime as a tip for this kindness, she would have drug me back to the wood shed.

Those drugs are still in my veins; and they affect my behavior in everything I do, say, and think. They are stronger than cocaine, crack, or heroin, and if today's children had this kind of drug problem, America might be a better place today.

Re:In other news

[morgan_greywolf]

an obvious examples examples being frontal nudity or other explicit pornography. Nudity and pornography aren't the same thing. Exposing a child to an unclothed human body isn't likely to be psychologically damaging at all really. Pornography is the depiction of sexual acts. Nudity displayed in a non-sexual context is absolutely fine for children to see. The problem with American society is that it seems to be unable to distinguish between the two.

Re:In other news

[uniquename72]

...every person has an abolute right to not be even "incidentally exposed" to some things,or have their child exposed to it, an obvious examples examples being frontal nudity or other explicit pornography. I agree -- we should ban the internet!!

incidental exposure can be irreparably damaging I hear people say this, yet 100% of people I've asked saw porn as children and didn't turn into serial killers. Could you cite a source that isn't funded by any religious group? I find it much more likely that kids who are traumatized by such things are harmed more by their parents' serious over-reaction than by the porn itself -- Janet Jackson's breast comes to mind (as an example of the "frontal nudity" that you're so worried about).

Funny how the world is full of 2-year-olds who see tits all the time, yet show those same tits to an 8-year-old and suddenly they've been scarred for life.

Re:In other news

[The Spoonman]

incidental exposure can be irreparably damaging, depending on what the exposure is to.

There are very few things that are irreparably damaging, and they all require a lot more exposure than "incidental". Catching a half-second shot of a breast is not going to turn a child into a serial killer or even make them mildly anti-social. At BEST, it'll generate some giggles on the school yard the following morning and be forgotten moments later. While home from school, I was one of the "fortunate" few who caught the Bud Dwyer incident, live on the air. It was freaky, but didn't even bring about a nightmare.

But, beyond that, in Europe, one can expect to find hard core pornography on broadcast television, and yet it's only the US where you find the highest incidence of serial killers and sociopaths. I would attribute that to the ridiculous, puritanical, half-assed armchair psychology from people like you who believe such stupid statements like the one italicized above.

Re:In other news

[hedwards]

I have to strongly and completely disagree with one thing you said - incidental exposure can be irreparably damaging, depending on what the exposure is to. Not so much words, but every person has an abolute right to not be even "incidentally exposed" to some things,or have their child exposed to it, an obvious examples examples being frontal nudity or other explicit pornography. Great idea, but the most damaging programs on TV aren't "incidental" there designed specifically to be desired by the depraved.

Most reality programming for example is deliberately set up to exploit the participants as the producers torture the participants for ratings.

Dramas that portray the criminal justice system through fictional stories. In pretty much all the cases I know of they use deliberately unrealistic portrayals of both the pretty much everything involved in order to make it catchy to the sort of people that thoroughly enjoy schadenfreude.

Reality programs which cover real crimes or real accidents.

Realistically if you're going to try and suggest that "incidental exposure" is harmful you're going to have to demonstrate that it is more harmful than the slew of demeaning, degrading, perverse shows that the FCC thinks are A-OK for viewing.

And I find it hard to believe that a couple of seconds of breasts on TV or a few expletives that slip through are going to cause more harm than the other programing which is already on the air.

Really the only way for parents to deal with this is either to sit in the same room and monitor the programming, cut off anything but approved DVDs or just remove the TV and internet completely from places that kids can access.

Re:In other news

[ucblockhead]

My son is 5 1/2. I don't believe he has seen live TV since he was six months old. Between DVDs and Tivo, it is pretty easy to completely control what he watches.

It wasn't profanity that prompted us to do this. It was the violent promos for the local and national news. But we didn't need the government to solve that for us.

Re:In other news

[blueg3]

"...but every person has an abolute right to not be even "incidentally exposed" to some things..."

That's not true. You have a certain right to not be forced to be subjected to objectionable material (the corollary to the right to free speech is the right to walk away), but this doesn't extend to any claim that public resources must be restricted to conform to some mutually-agreed-upon idea of "acceptable". If the option to turn off the television is reasonable, then your right to not listen/view is satisfied.

Don't tack the word "absolute" onto a discussion of rights just because you happen to think that right is particularly important. :p

Re:In other news

[IndustrialComplex]

an obvious examples examples being frontal nudity

What is wrong with nudity?

Re:In other news

[cpt kangarooski]

No, ever since the Supreme Court decided Cohen v. California, such ordinances have been well-known to be unconstitutional. You do not have a right to not be offended in public. You do have a right to offend others in public, however. No one's morality need be considered. You really need to read the opinion. It's pretty good, and can be found here.

So, in fact, I would be shocked and outraged if a public park did not allow a rapper to curse and swear at a public playground. Regardless of how I might feel about the rapper, his rights -- and by extension, everyone's rights -- are paramount. As for a supposed right to not be offended in a public place, there's just no such animal.

Please read the Court's opinion and educate yourself.

Re:In other news

[Creedo]

More on topic, just because I can use a v-chip enabled TV or utilize TV ratings doesn't mean a show should be aired that has filth in it.
And this is the point. YOU don't like it, so YOU wish to enforce YOUR MORALS on SOMEONE ELSE.

You are free to think it is filth. You are free to keep it out of your house. You are even free to bitch about it in public. But the moment you try to dictate what I can watch, you've stepped over the line. If you don't like it, or don't want your kid seeing it, you know what to do. But keep the hell out of MY living room.

I think...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I speak for us all when I say "About fucking time!"

Where does it stop?

[Ethanol-fueled]

How blatantly arbitrary and unfair. Why is the FCC flipping out over "fck" on the radio after this went unpunished!

On a related note( possibly straying offtopic) this was a big issue in L.A. and elsewhere across the US with Spanish-language radio stations that were getting away with their equivalent of uncensored Howard Stern. How will the FCC go after them? What about Korean radio curses? When does it end? Hopefully the FCC will be so swamped with complaints that they'll be unable to investigate them all, and then they'll quit being our mommy and focus their efforts towards the future of spectral management.

Re:Where does it stop?

[Walpurgiss]

It went more or less unpunished because South Park is on a cable TV network, not broadcast TV. The 6am - 10pm decency rules don't apply to cable or satellite television broadcasts.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7301244.stm

This bbc story about it mentions this information.

Re:Where does it stop?

[gnick]

A couple of local DJs, in order to avoid fines over the word "shit", have taken to regularly saying "shite". Why in the H-E-double-hockey-sticks is one any more inappropriate than the other?!? This is just farking silly. If a radio station/TV station/whatever airs stuff that you find offensive or inappropriate for your kids, change the fuggin station...

Re:Where does it stop?

[Hatta]

If you don't like it, you're free to leave the room or change the channel. If I don't like censorship, what options do I have?

And why are your feelings more important than mine?

Re:Where does it stop?

[Microlith]

And I'm offended by those that use obscenities;

You don't have the right to not be offended.

You can, however, criticize them for their impotence in linguistic capabilities. This is the nature of free speech and freedom of expression.

Re:Where does it stop?

[drkich]

What the FRAK are you talking about?

Re:Where does it stop?

[Umuri]

Yeah.... Let's go with that belief.

Because obviously someone uses a profane word because they lack the eloquence to call someone a bumbling ignorant uncultured swine of a simpleton. And obviously when someone wishes to damn someones soul to eternally burn in the fires of hell, they must say so in such verbage, instead of just simplifying it to "damn you" with the rest understood.

Obviously people use profane words because they lack the vocabulary to use others words, and NOT because certain words have three key features:

1. understood nearly universally within the culture
2. carry a weight to them, especially when said very sparsly
3. convey the point they are intended with little room for misunderstanding

True one could be complex with their insults and verbose with their exclamations, but that would truly render them useless.
What good is it to call someone a hedonistic glutton if they don't understand what you're saying?
You would feel good you've insulted someone who can't understand what you're saying, and that is a worthless act. At least if you call them a lazy fatass they understand that they need to get up and move, in your opinion.

I would argue that a well placed fuck or damn is more important than a good vocabulary. More so when you reserve your usage of them, as people notice when someone who rarely does so, curses.

Re:Where does it stop?

[Hatta]

Why do you get to define what sort of language is permissible and what kind isn't? I would argue that censorship is vandalism of language, as quite often there's nothing as expressive as a well used profanity.

There is no objective measure of what language is lower or higher than another. It's all just words.

Re:Where does it stop?

[Hatta]

As Lenny Bruce said, "If they can take away your right to say 'fuck', they can take away your right to say 'fuck the government'". And that's a message that deserves to be broadcast.

Re:Where does it stop?

[Hatta]

Some people are offended by the use of the n-word. Should that censorship be overturned? Would you like it if every show on prime-time TV started using that word all the time?

If it bothered me, I'd watch something else. If enough people watched something else, broadcasters would stop saying things that drove away their viewers.

There are many other things I could fit in instead of the n-word. Isn't preventing certain kinds of... let's call it deviant pornography... from being shown on TV censorship? Are you arguing against that as well?

Yes, of course. Let the viewers decide.

Which is more likely to be harmful: no cursing, or tons of it?

Censorship is immeasurably more harmful. We cannot let the government get in the habit of prohibiting speech it doesn't like.

"And why are your feelings more important than mine?"

Think about it this way, people who advocate censorship believe they have a right not to be offended. That right should apply equally to me and my offense at censorship. It's an inherently contradictory position. As for me, I don't think I have a right not to be offended, but we do have rights such as freedom of speech, freedom from religion, etc, that should be sufficient to prevent the government from censoring.

Re:Where does it stop?

[Palshife]

You live in America, yes? Swearing *is* common convention. Your elitism does not negate reality.

Crazy society

[HungSoLow]

In some cases you can watch people fuck, but you can't say fuck. Others you can see someone get fucked up, but can't say fuck. I mean seriously, what the fuck?

Re:Crazy society

[rbochan]

"We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won't allow them to write 'fuck' on their airplanes because it's obscene!"
        - Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

Re:Fucking FCC

[Hatta]

This is as good a place as any to mention the perennial classic, the FCC song.

The FCC is destructive

[JonC88]

I'm a DJ for a very large college radio station (broadcasting all over the Boston metropolitan area in the middle of FM dial) and the most disconcerting facet of the post-wardrobe malfunction FCC crackdowns is the fact that even a single incident would result in my station being shut down. We got one complaint a few years ago (in the more tolerant era), so now, if we were to become a repeat offender, the fine--several hundred thousand dollars--would completely bankrupt the station. SInce we're independently funded through ad revenue, there's no way we could pay, and we'd be off the air--just if somebody complained to the FCC because a late-night DJ slipped up and said "Fuck" on air, even when we're actually allowed to play music containing the same word.

To me, at least, it seems incredibly obvious that the punishments are beyond the limits of sanity. The FCC is trying to look out for the standards of our community? Yes, my station plays underground rock and hip-hop at night (I DJ for those programs), but during the day, it's exclusively jazz and classical. If, at 3am, a hip-hop DJ curses, leading to a complaint and the end of the station, who really loses? I suspect that the thousands of classical and jazz listeners would be more on the losing end than the asshole who called in the complaint or any of the other people who happened to hear the word "Fuck" in the middle of the night.

The FCC is just one manifestation of how colossally fucked up governmental regulation is becoming. I'm all for the government trying to help out the people, but not when there's clearly no understanding of how the real world actually operates.

Re:v-chip

[BitZtream]

One approach would be to have the default as-shipped v-chip settings be more conservative, so that people have to go into a setup menu to specifically request more violence, more nudity, more adult language. Given that, networks should then be free to mark their broadcasts appropriately (regardless of time of day) and not worry about who will be offended. Anyone offendable won't be able to watch the broadcast without changing their TV settings to allow it.

Or we could just modify the default settings for parents to have them do their job and be parents rather than depending on someone/something else to pay attention to what their child is doing. Perhaps if they would actually do their job as a parent rather than breeding then pawning their kids off on someone else to watch them and depend on technology and goverment bodies to determine whats safe for them to hear/see then the US might not be in the state its in currently.

IOW, why have both the FCC and V-chips. One should be enough as far as content goes.

As per my above statement, neither are needed for censorship in this matter, just have parents that pay attention to what their kids are doing, then neither is needed, its distributed computing the way its meant to be. What these things facilitate is parents who are completely out of touch with their children.

Appearently is okay to let your children watch the news reports of school shootings so they get the idea to do it themselves rather be responsible and in touch with your child enough to know that A) watching such thing isn't the brightest of ideas for your unstable goth brat, B) you might actually notice they are an unstable goth brat who has no idea how good their life is compared to someone with real problems.

Slightly in line with this rant ... I think we should send all the little depressed teenagers who think life is soooooooo horrible to Ethiopia for a 6 month period to live with a family that has real problems, let them figure out how bad life can actually be rather than cuddling them and telling them how sorry we are for them.

I'm more worried...

[SCHecklerX]

...about 'g' rated evangelism on TV. Truly. What the fuck? If ANYTHING requires parental guidance, it's that religious brainwashing being brought to your 5 year old on public television. That crap should be what is being forced into different timeslots and censored. Certainly not given a "TV-G" rating! Christ!

Need to replace the FCC

[Thaelon]

What we first need to do is change the FCC so that it's not headed by appointed officials, but rather by elected representatives.

The FCC's power has grown far beyond it's original intention (regulating airwaves frequencies in the U.S.). Apparently they only do things in response to complaints. Or at least that's how it once was. But the really fucked up thing is 99% of complaints come from one organization.

So essentially this one single organization is responsible for most of the - detrimental in my opinion - changes to what is allowed to be broadcast or not.

It's not the popular decision. People just think it is because this one fucked up organization has such broad powers and people just assume that it's the popular opinion. It is not.

The organization responsible for all this? The Parent's Television Council. The sick thing is they're proud to be the nation's most influential advocacy organization yet have barely a million members. That's right one million uptight fucks are responsible for 99.8-99.9% of all FCC regulation that affects 303 million people.

And the FCC allows it.

To other countries: The US is not up tight! Most of us love a good nipple on TV. It's this one organization that has been acting via the screwed up joke that is our FCC that has watered down our TV, not popular opinion.

Bad words

[tepples]

What I want to know is why are ANY words considered profane or obscene to begin with, as if no one was unconfortable with these words they would simply not be used for shock effect nor expression the way they are now. English swear words tend to fall into three conceptual categories that westerners treat as serious business for more-or-less understandable reasons.

• Intercourse (blowjob, cock, cooter, cum, cunt, dick, dong, fuck, jizz, pussy, screw). This brings VD and extra mouths to feed.
• Elimination of waste material from the body (ass, fart, peter, piss, shit, turd). These spread disease.
• Religion (damn, god, hell). Names referring to spirits considered good are said to cheapen the name; names referring to spirits considered evil are said to make them more powerful.

Restrictions apply much less strictly to words in Childish (e.g. call the stork, poop, wee, etc.) because children have to have some name for their own parts and functions. They also apply less strictly to words in Medicalese (e.g. feces, flatulence, intercourse, penis, urine, vagina) which symbolize intent to apply a serious tone to the discussion of serious business.