Indecency Update 12.14.06

FOX SAYS FCC'S INDECENCY POLICY GOES TOO FAR
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
The FCC's new indecency policy of cracking down on cussing "has reached too far and censored too much speech," said Fox in its reply to the FCC's defense of its new policy. Fox took aim in a filing with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. The FCC found two Fox Billboard Awards show broadcasts to be profane, and thus indecent, because they allowed variants of the words "fudge" and "shoot" to be broadcast outside of the FCC's 10 p.m.-6 a.m. safe harbor for "indecent" broadcast speech. Fox argued that neither of the broadcasts would have been found indecent under the previous almost 30 years of FCC indecency policy (1975-2004) and that "without adequate explanation or even acknowledgment, the FCC has abandoned the restrained understanding of indecency that served the public for three decades." Fox says the FCC's new policy means it can punish "virtually any isolated use of the words," with only "arbitrary exceptions when the word might be justified in context."
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6399802.html?display=Breaking...

NBC SAYS FCC IS VIOLATING ITS OWN INDECENCY STANDARD
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
After receiving a terrible tongue lashing from FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, executives of NBC are saying the Commission is indecent. Actually, NBC says that the FCC's profanity findings against phrases like Cher's "Fudge 'em" on Fox's Billboard Awards or Bono's "Fudging brilliant" on NBC's Golden Globes, both cited by the FCC, are misapplied and contrary to "its own standard, common sense, conventional wisdom and ordinary usage." In its brief to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York in the broadcaster court challenge to that new FCC profanity enforcement policy, NBC says the FCC decision should be reversed and that "no reasonable observer could actually conclude that Cher was exhorting the audience to have 'chocolate activities' with those critics, or that her comment related somehow to chocolate-producing organs." NBC says it is not saying a "properly designed indecency regime could never bar the repeated broadcast of expletives used as intensifiers" but that the FCC cannot "transform a standard that expressly requires material to 'describe or depict' sex into a dragnet for words that neither depict nor describe sexual or excretory activity." NBC also argued that the FCC's decision is invalid under the Chevron test, which holds that an appeals court must first determine if the will of Congress was clear in a statute, and if so, that ends the discussion. NBC argues, as it did in its initial brief to the court, that Congress clearly intended to be blasphemous and that the FCC cannot arbitrarily change the definition to fit its regulatory leanings.
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6399800.html?display=Breaking...