Supreme Court ruling on foul language is a good thing
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"I don't know why people think that somehow the First Amendment applies to network television. It doesn't. It's like the way free speech doesn't apply at work. You can't just walk into your boss' office and say, 'You're a $%&#@&* and I'm gonna go back to work now.' No, you're not."
- Jon Stewart
The Supremes, as they are sometimes disrespectfully referred to (the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court), have ruled in favor of the Federal Communications Commission and its toughening policies toward bad language on television.
That's a good thing, I think, and designed to protect innocent young ears from the ever-increasing deluge of cursing and swearing in today's TV shows.
It won't save the kids entirely, however. There are just too many other sources of "learning" foul language to believe they won't be exposed.
For one thing, there's the Internet, with its many sources of entertaining language for the kiddos. And there are their friends, some of whom always seem to come up with another fun word to memorize. Even parents, myself certainly included, can be the source of a storm of those forbidden words in a careless moment.
Still, I think it's a good thing to stop the stuff where we can, and the FCC is to be commended for doing that. So I think the High Court made the right decision on Tuesday when it sided with the commission on doing away with the old policy of granting "one free expletive" on a show.
In doing so, the justices threw out a lower court decision that had sided with the Fox network to the extent that it ordered the FCC to come up with a "reasoned analysis" of its tougher new policy. Instead of doing that, the commission appealed the decision to the Supreme Court.
Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the majority 5-4 opinion that the tough new FCC policy was "neither arbitrary nor capricious."
However, he and the other justices did not tackle the tough question of whether or not banning the foul language was a violation of the First Amendment guarantee of free speech.
Apparently, the catalysts for this whole legal hassle were some live award programs on which celebrities used some rather colorful language. The FCC then began its crackdown, reasoning that to give anyone on TV "one free expletive" or allowing a "fleeting expletive" here and there (the old policies) didn't really make sense if they were serious about cleaning up the airwaves.
The five conservative Supreme Court justices voted for the tougher policy, of course, and the four liberals on the court dissented, of course.
One of the liberals, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, said frankly, "There is no way to hide the long shadow the First Amendment casts over what the commission has done."
Maybe so. But like the noted Justice Byron White said long ago, the First Amendment doesn't mean you can yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
I don't think it means you can say "$%&#@%" anytime you feel like it, either, especially when a million kids may be listening.
Makes me want to clean up my own language. After all, that's where it begins for all of us.
Jim Bishop is a senior editor for the Advocate. Leave him a message at 361-574-1210 or jbishop@vicad.com or comment on this column at www.victoriaadvocate.com
