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Supreme Court To Rule On TV Censorship
Khashishi writes "The LA times and the Associated Press report that the FCC v. Fox Television Stations case is being heard in the Supreme Court. The FCC policy would impose a heavy fine on use of 'indecent' words on broadcast television, which Fox and others are claiming is a violation of free speech. The case was appealed after being ruled in Fox's favor in a federal appeals court in New York. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Antonin Scalia support the FCC policy of censorship." Here's a transcript (PDF) of the oral arguments.
A video on this very monument (I'm not intentionally karma whoring, I promise):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kV0xRcC1aA
I am officially gone from
1. The entertainment and news divisions are run an operated separately, as they should be.
or
2. People that believe in social and/or financial conservativism (like me) can also appreciate off color humor (I own every season of Family Guy that's available on DVD).
or
3. Fox news and Fox entertainment division cater to different markets that they thought were being under served by their competitors
or
4. Some combination of the above 3.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Personally, I would like to know why any word is considered vulgar. Context is the only thing that gives meaning to the human language. You can say the same thing in two different contexts, and one way will really hurt someone's feelings, and the other hurts no one. I partially blame this way of looking at words for the lack of tact in much of society.
I know some of the reasons that some words were originally problematic, but since their subtly shaded meanings have been lost in time, even in those cases it no longer makes any sort of sense.
Even the meta words have lost all shade of meaning, curse word, vulgarity, and expletive are different things (or were at one time).
For example, to say that someone was damned was to say they were literally so horrible that even God could never forgive them. That's a strong statement in a pious Christian society. Naturally, that makes the phrase "God damn you" a curse. Literally (amongst believers) a hope that God will find your immortal soul irredeemable and that you will spend eternity in hell.
To not give a damn was quite a different thing. Tinkers in the day had the same stereotype of emitting a constant stream of curses, expletives, and vulgarities that a sailor has today. Thus their curses were exceedingly common and of little value. So to not give a tinker's damn was just saying you felt the situation didn't have even that minimal value to you. It wasn't a curse. The willingness to utter a vulgar word to make the point did convey additional strength to the statement.
Mere vulgarities were simply less imaginative word choices that said more about the speaker than the person spoken to, implying poor breeding. However, in the right context, you could be implying that the person you're speaking to hasn't the breeding to understand a better word choice or that they simply do not warrant more refined language. Naturally, in some social circles that's quite offensive. Either way, you wouldn't want your children to say those words as it would reflect poorly on them and their parents.
Oddly enough, when people show great offense at words without even knowing why their use would be offensive they reveal mostly their own ignorance and "lack of breeding".
At the same time, constant use of expletives really weakens them. If you drop the F bomb every other sentence, how can you express a more extreme displeasure?
Personally, I think expletives in general tend to be over-used but at the same time I can't agree with censorship or claiming some special harm to children. Censure and watching something else are much more appropriate.