Don't be expecting to hear Dave Ross (KIRO m-f, 9a-12p) to be saying "Fuck that shit," on the air any time soon, but Tuesday, a federal appeals court threw out the policy, saying it’s unconstitutionally vague and threatens speech "at the heart of the First Amendment."
The court’s arguments make inordinate sense to those of us who love the Constitution and say shit whether our mouths are full of it or not. (We gotta say, we can scarcely think of anyone we know in media besides John Carlson (KOMO KVI m-f 12-2p 3-6p) who doesn’t).
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan wrote:
They used as examples a Vermont radio station’s refusal to air a political debate because one local politician had previously used naughty words on the air. In Moosic, Pa., a station was so afraid someone might say "shit" over one of their live mikes, they decided against doing live news events unless they affected matters of public safety."By prohibiting all `patently offensive' references to sex, sexual organs and excretion without giving adequate guidance as to what `patently offensive' means, the FCC effectively chills speech, because broadcasters have no way of knowing what the FCC will find offensive.”
"To place any discussion of these vast topics at the broadcaster's peril has the effect of promoting wide self-censorship of valuable material which should be completely protected under the First Amendment.”
"This chill reaches speech at the heart of the First Amendment," the appeals court said.
The FCC hasn’t responded yet, but FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski reportedly said: “That’s fucked-up.”
The Commission can write a policy that’s constitutional.
Judge Rosemary Pooler described in the ruling the evolution of the FCC's rules for indecent speech.
The FCC first exercised its authority to regulate speech in 1975 after the airing of comedian George Carlin's "Filthy Words" monologue broadcast on the radio at 2 in the afternoon.
The FCC’s enforcement policy was “restrained,” limiting itself to the seven specific words in the Carlin monologue. Pooler noted that after the FCC banned the seven dirty words for broadcasters, not a single enforcement action was brought in the next nine years. And in 1987, the FCC ended its focus on specific words, adopting a "contextual approach to indecent speech.” Things were cool, despite the bite of federal authority taken by the FCC.
Buthe blue-nosed Bush FCC cracked down, changing the policy in 2004, responding to a 2003 NBC Golden Globes broadcast at which U2 lead singer Bono was heard to utter, “fucking brilliant."The FCC said that the F-word, in any context, "inherently has a sexual connotation" and “can lead to enforcement.” It was the first time that a single use of a word — a so-called fleeting expletive — could result in a fine.
The Bushites went all Pentacostal on foul-mouthed broadcasters: They'd began issuing record fines for indecency violations and treated each licensee's broadcast of the same program as a separate violation.
The FCC playing to its GOP religious right-wing constituency found its ban also was violated by a 2002 broadcast of the Billboard Music Awards in which singer Cher used the phrase “Fuck 'em" and a 2003 Billboard awards show iwhere Nicole Richie said, "Have you ever tried to get cow shit out of a Prada purse? It's not so fucking simple." (probably the most brilliant observation ever made by Richie).
Excessive fines drove Howard Stern, one of the top earners in the business, off the air, and onto satellite radio.The Supreme Court threw out the ”fleeting expletive” rule after a network challenge in 2006. They sent the whole mess back to the lower court to rule on First Amendment considerations.Tuesday’s ruling is the result.
It’s all very confusing and the court wants to make policies clear, legal and consistent. The judge writes that the FCC found itself in the position of ruling certain commonly used expressions to be indecent and other s not so much.
She says such as "pissed off," "up yours" and "kiss my ass," were found not to be patently offensive, while “fuck-you very much” most certainly is.
(We woulda loved to be a fly on the wall when those considerations were coming down: “But my dear boy, ‘piss’ is ever so much nicer than ‘shit,’ all the best people would agree.” Or “Damn it, man don’t you know: ‘to shit is human, to fuck, divine…’”).
"The English language is rife with creative ways of depicting sexual or excretory organs or activities," Pooler wrote. "Even if the FCC were able to provide a complete list of all such expressions, new offensive and indecent words are invented every day."
So if this ruling holds does that mean they can cut through the crap and call it the Blow Job Shea Show?
Posted by: Ryder | July 13, 2010 at 11:06 PM
Hmmm...I have to think about this..
words lose their effectiveness when they are overused...I am a firm believer in the First Amendment....hmmm
Posted by: sparky | July 13, 2010 at 11:07 PM
...new offensive and indecent words are invented every day."
Or borrowed from other languages. I was told that fuck derives from the German ficken. Sounds good to me either way. :)
What would my mother say!
Posted by: joanie | July 13, 2010 at 11:17 PM
If all decency rules were thrown out the window, stations like 100.7 The Buzz might have survived as an extremely low brow shock jock station. But then kids find this kind of content and eat it up, they take the message of carelessness and flippant disrespect to heart like a blueprint for failure and then the parents are blamed, but how are we supposed to stop a kid from listening to ubiquitous FM radio? Not only does the average household have six radios, but you can buy an FM radio for one cent, yet parents would be blamed for "allowing" their kids to tune in to smut talk.
But the solution isn't to throw the baby out with the bathwater, they should come up with better guidelines than just having a few words you're never allowed to say. Suppose you have the public, like a jury, and not some appointed bureaucrat, decide what content has crossed the line. If you ask a jury "was Bono warping the minds of children?" with his utterance, they'd say "no" 10 times out of 10. And there might be things they might find offensive that involve no cuss words at all.
Posted by: Andrew | July 13, 2010 at 11:43 PM
Well thank God. This means we can finally tell the Tea Baggers what they are really doing.
Posted by: Wendell | July 14, 2010 at 03:52 AM
Andrew, do you actually know any kids who still listen to radio, or even know what one is?
Seriously - all of this effort to protect "the children," when most media they consume isn't regulated and has no prohibitions on content beyond the vigilance of parents. Which is as it should be. This is a rare burst of fucking common sense.
Posted by: Pete | July 14, 2010 at 06:30 AM
Suits is making fun Bill Gares Sr on a daily basis now.. in his typical juvenile fashion, playing clips of himn saying a few phrases taken from a speech where hes' proposing state income taxes on the rich. Apparently Bryan thinks the way the elderly gent says these phrases is particularly lame and a cause for ridicule. Note to Bryan Suits-- thank you for your service. Beyond that you're a tiresome, annoying and petulant little fellow, with an arrested maturity level that stopped developing somewhere during your middle school years. It's not nice to make fun of your elders - besides the joke is on you, since Bill Senior could buy and sell you , with a net worth easily 200 times that of yourself. Unlike your brief, failed engagement with bigtime L.A. Radio ("LA proved to be too much for the man")he seized the bigtime in the lawyering field and prospered to great heights.
Posted by: Tommy008 | July 14, 2010 at 07:27 AM
sorry Bill Gates Sr. , not "Gares"
Posted by: Tommy008 | July 14, 2010 at 07:28 AM
Joanie, I was told that fuck stands for
For Unlawful Carnal knowledge, which is what cops in Britain would write when prostitutes are arrested.
Posted by: Mike Barer | July 14, 2010 at 08:30 AM
no
Posted by: Andrew | July 14, 2010 at 09:17 AM
Mike, Snopes says no
But there are some other ideas there about how the word originated.
Posted by: sparky | July 14, 2010 at 09:32 AM
" Andrew, do you actually know any kids who still listen to radio, or even know what one is?
Seriously - all of this effort to protect "the children," when most media they consume isn't regulated and has no prohibitions on content beyond the vigilance of parents. Which is as it should be. This is a rare burst of fucking common sense."
I don't know if you've heard uncensored comedy on XM 150, but if that was broadcast freely, kids under 18 would be the only people who listen to it. And it's not biting social commentary, it's mostly bitter commedians talking about the intricacies of anal sex. That's the reality of lawless radio. Our society would never stand for this on easily accessible FM airwaves.
It's one thing for parents to deny their kids XM radio, internet access or even cable TV, but denying them of a radio is impractical. Even a five year old can assemble a crystal radio.
This is yet another great example of how Libertarian ideology is flawed. You can't have a purely individualistic political theory and simply expect the societal loose ends to magically tie themselves off. The social impact of individual behavior has to be taken into account.
Posted by: Andrew | July 14, 2010 at 10:59 AM
Hey Andrew - fair enough, but you didn't really address my point, which is that not that many people under, say, age 25 even listen to radio, much less as a primary medium. And they're for sure not assembling a crystal set (though I'm sure there are five-year-olds who can build a laptop the same way kids in the mid-20th-century built radios).
My point wasn't so much that gov't has no business regulating speech (that's another discussion) as that government already fails to regulate speech in most media kids consume - Internet, phones, video games, music and audio downloads, and so on. The only difference for broadcast radio and TV is the platform, which, thanks to the anachronistic use of spectrum space, is subject to FCC oversight. Eighty and even 30 years ago, that was the only way most people connected via instantaneous (as opposed to published print) media. No more.
Is a lot of what's put out over uncensored media puerile and offensive? Absolutely. In fact, it doesn't have a lot of appeal for anyone over the emotional age of 21. But when the only filters for kids on so much of what they consume are the limits their parents (hopefully) set, why regulate the remaining 10%? All it does is put broadcast radio and TV at an even greater competitive disadvantage than they already face.
If you want to argue that we need the regulation for the social good (which I have mixed feelings about; I'm just arguing pragmatically here), you'd have to address all those media, not just broadcast radio and TV stations, whose cultural influence among young people, especially radio, is declining fast.
Posted by: Pete | July 14, 2010 at 01:10 PM
I agree with you Pete...but it is kinda sad that we have to potty up the language on radio in order to be competitive.
Posted by: sparky | July 14, 2010 at 02:35 PM
You have to distinguish between free speech and public disruption. The idea that you can't shout obsenities in a crowded public place is based on keeping the peace. Radio is a lot like a crowded place. There's no way for a parent to stop their child from hearing someone who is shouting directly at them, and likewise, it's hard for a parent to make sure their kid isn't listening to the radio. There's no parental lock to seperate good stations from bad ones. Radios are so ubiquitous that the medium doesn't lend itself to privacy or parental oversight.
Posted by: Andrew | July 14, 2010 at 04:24 PM
What gives these words such power? They're off limits. McGinn is considering ways to eliminate the nuisance and violence after bar closing.
Why not just allow everything and let the bars stay open all night if they want to. Let businesses decide on their own hours. Let people talk however they wish.
Diffuses both problems: words lose their power to shock (although they may still offend some old people) and people leave bars when they are done drinking at different hours of the night or they stay and drink all night which means they're not drunk and disorderly on the street.
Works for me.
Posted by: joanie | July 14, 2010 at 10:00 PM
Reading and writing blogs are fine endeavors but they can't beat the satisfaction gained from a piece of ass in the Johnson grass.
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Sarah "Fargo" Palin is reportedly furious, just furious over the surprise engagement of her grandbaby's ingrate, tattletale father, Levi Johnson, to daughter Bristol. Bristol announced to to US WEEKLY before announcing it to pruneface prude mommy. hahahah Sarah. Having been trained well by Mommy in the art of moneygrubbing, the couple are shopping their wedding to television networks for big $$$ as a reality series. hahahahahahahaha turd in your coffee for ye Sarah? maybe if you'd had a decent relationship with your daughter, you freak, this wouldn't have happened. haha Sarah hahah Sarah
Posted by: Tommy008 | July 16, 2010 at 10:34 PM
I LIKE THIS MOST BUT I THINK THERE MUST BE SOME IMAGES RELATED THIS
Posted by: BEBO | September 10, 2010 at 10:03 PM