Obscenity: The F-word’s day in court

Isn’t it time we grew up? said syndicated columnist Dale McFeatters. While war, historic elections, and economic meltdown continued to roil the planet last week, the U.S. Supreme Court was hearing a challenge to the Federal Communications Commission’s new policy on “fleeting expletives,” the spontaneous curse-words that celebrities sometimes blurt on live television when they win the World Series or get handed a statuette. These isolated profanities have been tolerated for decades, said the Los Angeles Times in an editorial, on the sensible grounds that when, say, the rock singer Bono said, “This is really f---ing brilliant” at the 2003 Golden Globes, he wasn’t talking about sex and was therefore not meeting the classic definition of obscenity. Nonetheless, the Bush administration’s prudish FCC decided several years ago that it could impose huge fines for blurted-out profanities, whether or not they had anything to do with sex or excretion. “You don’t have to be [expletive deleted] brilliant to recognize that the rule is ripe for reversal by the Supreme Court.”

Cursing on TV may not be “the sign of the apocalypse,” said the Chicago Sun-Times, but it does contribute to “the coarsening of society.” Thanks to the profusion of swear words on cable and the Internet, teenagers now sound like longshoremen of old, using the F-word as an all-purpose adjective. That’s all the more reason for broadcast TV to be an oasis of decency, where parents and kids can spend a few hours free of foul language. “Making an exception for ‘fleeting’ obscenities is a sure recipe for more on-air vulgarity,” said the Chattanooga, Tenn., Times Free Press. That’s the last thing our already crude culture needs.

“Assuring decency is one thing,” said the Detroit Free Press, but capricious censorship is another. The same FCC commissioners who were so offended by Bono’s spontaneous cursing allowed an uncensored, prime-time showing of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, presumably because the constant profanity made war seem all the more hellish. Later, the FCC objected to the same curse words when they cropped up in a Martin Scorsese blues documentary. These inconsistencies apparently didn’t trouble the Supreme Court’s conservative members last week, said Jan Freeman in The Boston Globe. As Chief Justice John Roberts put it, there’s a difference between using the F-word in “Saving Private Ryan, when your arm gets blown off,” and using it at an awards ceremony. So how’s this for a new standard? “You can swear on daytime TV as long as you suffer grievous bodily harm.”

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