WASHINGTON, DC – The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released its decisions “resolving over 300,000 consumer complaints about the broadcast of indecent, profane, and/or obscene television programming,” according to an FCC press release.CBS is the network hit hardest by the FCC’s actions, and faces a total of $3.6 million dollars in fines. That total includes a $550,000 fine for Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction” during the halftime show of the 2004 Super Bowl, a fine which CBS had appealed, but has now been upheld by the FCC.
In addition to the Super Bowl incident, the FCC also slapped CBS with fines for episodes of “Without a Trace” and “The Surreal Life 2,” which the FCC asserts “contained numerous graphic, sexual images, to be impermissible under the Commission’s indecency standard.”
With regards to indecency complaints, “I believe the Commission has a legal responsibility to respond to them and resolve them in a consistent and effective manner,” FCC of Chairman Kevin J. Martin wrote in a statement which accompanied the decisions. “So I am pleased that with the decisions released today the Commission is resolving hundreds of thousands of complaints against various broadcast licensees related to their televising of 49 different programs. These decisions, taken both individually and as a whole, demonstrate the Commission’s continued commitment to enforcing the law prohibiting the airing of obscene, indecent and profane material.”
Robert Peters, the president of Morality in Media, applauded the FCC’s decisions, and asserted that the FCC’s actions were both constitutional and necessary.
“The FCC actions are the result of widespread dissatisfaction with the content of broadcast TV, as reflected in opinion poll after opinion poll which have repeatedly found that large majorities of adult Americans are offended by the glut of sex and vulgarity on TV,” Peters stated in a press release issued by Morality in Media. “Parents in particular are also concerned about the effects that TV sex and vulgarity are having on children.”
Peters added that the FCC actions are “necessary because the broadcast TV networks no longer have an industry-wide code and self-imposed internal standards that generally reflect community standards. Today, TV networks are primarily interested in reaching morally challenged teens and young adults, and one proven way to do that is with programming that is sexual and vulgar.”
Peters isn’t satisfied that the FCC is doing enough to combat indecency, however, and asserts that the FCC dismisses some “valid indecency complaints” because its definitions of ‘indecent’ and ‘profane’ are not broad enough, and because the FCC “confuses indecency with lewdness,” adding that the law “prohibits ‘indecent’ language, and content can be ‘indecent’ without being ‘lewd.’”
The FCC’s report and arguments in support of its decisions are extensive and laden with justifications for taking action and issuing fines. Arguably more interesting than the fines and determinations themselves is the analysis provided for each particular circumstance the FCC considered.
For example, in reviewing a case involving an appearance by pop singer Cher at the Golden Globe Awards, the Commission prints the actual offending sentence uttered by Cher – “People have been telling me I’m on the way out every year, right? So fuck ‘em.” – but thereafter refer to her utterance as use of the “F-Word”.
“The ‘F-Word’ is a vulgar sexual term so grossly offensive to members of the public that it amounts to a nuisance and is presumptively profane,” the FCC writes in their decision. “The ‘F-Word’ is one of the most offensive words in the English language, the broadcast of which is likely to shock the viewer and disturb the peace and quiet of the home.”
While the FCC decision acknowledges that in “rare contexts, language that is presumptively profane will not be found to be profane where its use is demonstrably essential to the nature of an artistic or educational work or essential to informing viewers on a matter of public importance,” they assert that in the case of Cher using the “F-word”, that rare standard is not met.
“Although in this case, the profane language used by Cher may have had some
communicative purpose, we do not believe that Fox has demonstrated that the use of suchlanguage was essential to informing viewers on a matter of public importance or that editing the language in question would have had a material impact on the network’s function as a source of news and information,” the FCC states in its decision.
