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Legal Commentary

: Althouse

Will the Golden Globes affect the Supreme Court's "fleeting expletives" case?

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At tonight's Golden Globes ceremony, the producer accepting the Best Drama award ? for "Slumdog Millionaire" ? said "Oh, fuck!" when he got the signal to cut his speech short. But we didn't hear it. There was a second of silence. So, as I noted at 10:03 Central Time on my live-blogging of the show, we got a conspicuous demonstration of how easy it is to snip out what has come to be known as a "fleeting expletive."

This Term, the Supreme Court is considering a case ? FCC v. Fox Television Stations ? on precisely this subject.

[In] March 2004, [the FCC] said, even a single use of ?the F-Word? on the air would be treated as illegal....
The agency changed its approach after getting complaints about two broadcasts on Fox television of the Billboard Music Awards ? the show in 2002 when singer-actress Cher used ?the F-Word,? and the show in 2003 when actress Nicole Richie used variations of that word and used the four-letter excrement word ? and a broadcast on NBC-TV in 2003 of the Golden Globe Awards, when rock singer Bono used a variation of ?the F-Word.?

Ha ha. The Golden Globes! And now here, tonight, we had the Golden Globes on a tape delay with the "oh, fuck!" removed. So it's not that hard for the broadcaster to protect us from the careless, casual speech of celebrities. I wonder which Supreme Court Justices were watching? Probably just Kennedy.

Full post as published by Althouse on January 11, 2009 (boomark / email).