On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court granted the FCC the power to censor and fine broadcast television networks that air profanity, no matter the context!
“Even when used as an expletive, the F-word’s power to insult and offend derives from its sexual meaning,” the conservative Justice Antonin Scalia argued to the Court.
The FCC’s previous ban on expletives was reversed in 2004 after Bono‘s Golden Globes acceptance speech when the U2 frontman described something as “really, really, f—ing brilliant” live on NBC.
If Bono were drop the f-bomb on air today???
NBC might as well dump their wallets onto the desk of the FCC!
Justice John Paul Stevens doesn’t agree with the Supreme Court’s new ruling on profanity – he believes that the context of the expletive is what makes it indecent, not the word itself.
“As any golfer who has watched his partner shank a short approach knows, it would be absurd to accept the suggestion that the resultant four-letter word uttered on the golf course describes sex or excrement and is therefore indecent,” said Stevens. “But that is the absurdity the FCC has embraced in its new approach to indecency.”
The question now is whether or not the Supreme Court is violating the networks’ First Amendment rights with the ban.
Andrew Jay Schwartzman, head of the Media Access Project isn’t ready to give up the fight just yet!
“We remain hopeful that the FCC’s restrictive policies will ultimately be declared unconstitutional, but there will be several more years of uncertainty, and impaired artistic expression, while the lower courts address the First Amendment issues which the court chose not to confront today,” Schwartzman said on Tuesday.
Fight the power!
[Image via L. Gallo/WENN.]