The FCC campaign to stop all swear words and nudity on US broadcast TV, even if they are uttered on a live show where the broadcaster has no control over events, appears to be in tatters after a US appeals court decision this week.
The court in question has thrown out the FCC’s $550,000 fine against CBS due to Janet Jackson ‘accidentally’ letting one of her breasts fall out of her dress, during the half time show at the 2004 Super Bowl.
This was followed by fines given out for one rock star swearing when he accepted an award and Howard Stern on radio discussing anal sex for the umpteenth time. We viewed the fines as arbitrary as there was no indication given by the FCC that this behavior would result in a fine, no policy change and no hard and fast set of rules by which broadcasters could judge the new regime.
This is now the second time in a year that a court has overturned an FCC fine, and it should be the last, if the FCC is wise enough to climb down. The moves were seen as cowtowing to a moral minority that had put President Bush in power, and now towards the end of his Presidency normality may be about to be restored. US TV stations have had to put in buffer periods in live shows so that they can bleep words out of programming before it is broadcast, at great expense.
The US Court of Appeals agreed that the FCC process was arbitrary and capricious, and an unannounced change of policy, not to mention that it flirted with breaching America’s First Amendment, about freedom of speech. The FCC had previously argued that the reversal in court only applied to spoken outbursts, not images. The FCC can now appeal the case to the Supreme Court, but we doubt very much that it will bother, given that a new, liberal regime is likely to be in power in the US before long.