News Item:
Court overturns FCC rule on prime time language
A New York appeals court has determined that F-bombs and other words of that type can be dropped while your kids are watching tv. If you try to keep tabs on what programs your children watch, or have certain channels blocked through your cable box, you might as well add ‘live tv’ to the list. While networks are required to censor any taped or filmed material, no one is any longer responsible for what goes out over the airwaves, if it’s live, and that includes whoever chooses to use the questionable language.
The essence of the ruling, if you try to place any logic on it, is that people don’t always say what they mean to say. Sometimes certain words just slip into a sentence. So if F-bombs are dropped in what the judge described as a ‘fleeting’ manner, just act like it never even happened.
The sticking point here, is not the definition of obscenity, but rather the definition of ‘fleeting’. If one says “F___ you” real quick, does that make it ‘fleeting’? If one says “Fffff_____ yyoouuu” real slow, then not so ‘fleeting? Maybe the deciding factor should be the correct usage of the word instead.
For instance, on a 2003 award show, Cher had this to say -
“I’ve also had critics for the last 40 years saying that I was on my way out every year. Right. So f__k ‘em. I still have a job and they don’t.”
Here, the F-bomb was properly used, if she was proposing to have sex with any that had criticised her over a given time period.
On the other hand, Nicole Ritchie, on the same show, uttered this about the title of her series The Simple Life -
“Why do they even call it ‘The Simple Life?’ Have you ever tried to get cow s__t out of a Prada purse? It’s not so f__king simple.”
This, as anyone can see, is only partially proper. The S-word would be ok, because it is possible to somehow get cow dung in your purse [not easy, but possible], but it would have absolutely nothing to do with sex. If it does, we don’t want to know about it, so using the F-bomb here would be incorrect.
News Source: PC World
Cartoon from Sid in the City
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1 user commented in " Expletives no longer deleted "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackSUPER! I think this ruling is a few decades late, but better late than never. I closely monitor what my milk-monsters watch by watching with them and by talking with them about the things we see and hear.
For example, we love the Broadway Channel (Sirius 77) but on occasion the host gets a case of the potty mouth so we talk about why he says those things and why they aren’t allowed to and what other people think about you when they hear you talk like that… So rather than demanding that the gov’t attempt to isolate my kids, I’m preparing them to live in the world and making sure that my value set -including the total freedom of speech- is firmly impressed onto their young minds.
In the immortal words of the great Howard Stern,” Fuc# the FCC!” They spend too much time and money on content (which the market will control) and not enough time on facilitating communication.
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