The Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals heard argument in the broadcast indecency case of Fox Broadcasting v. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – and if one can judge by the questions asked by the three-judge panel, it should be a no brainer for Fox when the decision is made in several weeks. At issue are two utterances by performers at the 2002 and 2003 Billboard Music Awards show; one in which Cher replied to critics with a, "Fuck 'em," and another in which Nicole Richie, describing her role in the sitcom The Simple Life, complained, "Does anybody know how fucking hard it is to get cowshit out of a Prada purse?"
Central to the issue before the court is the FCC's public position that only certain kinds of utterances in certain contexts will draw the FCC's ire and fines, (recently increased to $325,000 per violation), which led Judge Peter Hall to ask the FCC's attorney Eric Miller, "If Fox, wanting to air, so its viewers are reminded what's at issue here, pulls up the clips from the Billboard Music Awards and shows those two instances of Cher and Nicole Richie as background or in conjunction with reporting on what's happening in this courtroom here today, " would that be indecent?
Miller agreed that it wouldn't .. and there's the problem.
It did take more than half an hour to get to that point, much of the time was used on Fox's attorney Carter Phillips, who raised the important question of why this case had reached the court, while another earlier case, involving musician Bono's exclamation "Fucking brilliant" at the 2003 Golden Globe awards, was still in front of the FCC's commissioners with no decision on its "indecency" having yet been reached. However, in that case, the commission had issued what it termed the "Golden Globe Order," in which they announced, "We now depart from... any similar cases." That meant that whatever the FCC finally concluded in the Bono outburst, all cases thereafter involving "fleeting expletives" would be dealt with harshly.
Read more about this interesting case right here.
