13 Years Ago at the Last Houston Super Bowl – Janet Jackson’s Impact on FCC Indecency Rules

With the Super Bowl soon to kick off in Houston (TX), one recalls that during the last Super Bowl held in Houston, the notorious “wardrobe malfunction” occurred. To readers of this blog, that incident raises a whole host of other issues, as it triggered a re-examination of the Federal Communications Commission’s indecency rules which, 13 years after the incident, does not appear to have any end in sight.

The Super Bowl incident, as well as various other instances of “fleeting expletives” that slipped out during TV awards shows, led to numerous FCC fines in the early 2000s, and a long string of court appeals thereafter. These court appeals culminated in a Supreme Court decision throwing out the FCC’s fines against broadcasters, not because the FCC did not have the authority to issue fines for indecent conduct, but instead because the FCC did not give adequate notice to stations as to what was permitted and what was prohibited as it had not adequately explain why it had decided to abandon its prior policy of just issuing admonitions to stations that had inadvertent fleeting indecency slip-ups.