Every once in a while, I wished I watched a little TV.
Yesterday morning on live TV, on the staid cable network C-SPAN, judges and attorneys repeatedly used the F-word, and the S-word, and even some longer but equally volatile words.
It was important, but that made it no less entertaining.
They were discussing Nicole Richie and Cher, "Saving Private Ryan" and awards shows, the CBS "Early Show" and newscasts - and what words were and were not appropriate on broadcast television.
Blank you, and good night: Cher at the 2002 Billboard Music Awards.The occasion was an hour and 20 minutes of oral arguments in the case of "Fox Broadcasting v. Federal Communications Commission," broadcast live from New York's U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit. (Appropriate viewer advisories included.)
At issue was the FCC's revised standard of decency for over-the-air TV. The court, in its wisdom, let TV cameras capture and relay this most germane of communications issues.
Okay, so it wasn't exactly Watergate, and the program would have been enlivened by a sudden appearance of, say, William Shatner's Denny Crane from "Boston Legal."
Even so, yesterday's special edition of "U.S. Legal" had plenty of arguments to consider.
Each side went to bat with a single counsel: Carter Phillips for the network point of view, and Eric Miller for the FCC. Rating their performances in court, in TV terms, was easy: Phillips was solid without being showy, and the much younger Miller never knew what hit him.
What hit him, most of all, was Judge Rosemary Pooler. The other judges with her, especially Pierre Leval, all made Miller squirm as he tried to defend the FCC's strong stance against "fleeting expletives." Pooler, though, let Miller talk just long enough to dig himself several holes, then buried him in them.
When Miller explained that the FCC policy was crafted largely to protect young children from indecent language, Pooler asked why the FCC wasn't similarly concerned about violence. And when he said broadcast TV should be regulated differently than cable because it was more pervasive, and because some children had broadcast TVs in their bedrooms, Pooler argued that any parent who allowed an unmonitored TV in a child's room already was abdicating responsibility.
"You want to protect those children ... even when their parents are lax," she told him.
The slippery standards were made clear to anyone who watched yesterday. Cher uttering an obscenity live on the Billboard Music Awards? Unacceptable to the FCC.
That same utterance by Cher, if replayed on broadcast news putting these very Fox v. FCC hearings in context? Protected as news. But if the FCC seeks to protect children from any exposure, why is news safe?
The FCC didn't have persuasive answers to most of the tough questions posed yesterday.
Seeing the questions posed, though, was a blast.
