Supreme Court upholds fines for “fleeting expletives”

In what is being seen as a set-back for the TV industry, the Supreme Court Tuesday morning tentatively gave the Federal Communications Commission license to regulate the use of curse words during live broadcasts. Opponents of the close 5-4 ruling say the FCC did not adequately explain its policy shift.

The court explicitly refused to discuss freedom of speech concerns about the regulation, saying that discussion would have to come in another case.

The FCC has long regulated obscene and indecent language on broadcast television, but until 2006 it did not take action over so-called “fleeting expletives,” such as using the F-Word and S-Word spontaneously in a non-literal sense.

In 2006 the FCC issued fines for Fox’s broadcast in 2002 of a live appearance by Cher in which she said, “I’ve also had critics for the last 40 years saying that I was on my way out every year. Right. So f*** ‘em.” The FCC also fined a 2003 broadcast in which Nicole Richie said, “Why do they even call it ‘The Simple Life?’ Have you ever tried to get cow s*** out of a Prada purse? It’s not so f***ing simple.”

Fox appealed the fine to the courts, arguing that the FCC had not justified the change in their policy, since in 2004 the FCC allowed a broadcast of Bono using a fleeting expletive to go without fine.