April 30, 2013
Rush Limbaugh
Famous last name and all, Jackson never received so much press, before or since. Timberlake’s career has soared.
Which brings us to the latest “controversy”: the Red Sox player who delivered an impassioned (and nationally broadcast) pre-game speech to the hometown crowd shortly after the Boston Marathon bombings.
Specifically, David Ortiz declared, “This is our fucking city, and nobody’s going to dictate our freedom.”
Especially not the FCC. Use of that word would normally net broadcasters a $1-million fine, but in this case, the Commission hurriedly took the curse off the curse. Ortiz was simply speaking “from the heart,” the FCC chairman Tweeted reassuringly.
Known as “fleeting expletives,” such unscripted boo-boos (verbal and otherwise”see above) have become almost as ubiquitous as “leaked” sex tapes and other accidental-on-purpose amusements. The Supreme Court says “fleeting expletives” are constitutionally protected. The FCC fought that finding in case after case, but their recent “thumbs up” to Ortiz’s F-bomb may indicate that they’re just as sick of all this arbitrary, subjective, well, bullshit as so many of us.
Yet if the FCC didn”t exist, one industry might have to invent it: conservative talk radio.
According to the right-wing radio-creation myth, it was only after President Reagan abolished the FCC’s unworkable and liberally biased “Fairness Doctrine” in 1987 that Rush Limbaugh was finally free to speak his mind on the air, launching a rash of imitators and unleashing a much-needed alternative to the de facto leftist “mainstream media” that also happens to be a multi-billion-dollar-a-year enterprise.
The details may be in dispute, but conservative talk radio’s origin story, where the FCC plays the ever-looming villain who’s just about to bring back that censorious “Fairness Doctrine” any second now, has energized hotheaded hosts and united their millions of fans whenever they found themselves in the rare position of needing something to complain about.
In the Internet age of podcasts and YouTube, when America has few “communities” and fewer “standards,” the FCC’s relevance is debatable. We can mourn the coarsening of pop culture, but clearly the FCC’s existence these last seventy-eight years hasn”t done much to keep that at bay anyhow. The horse isn”t just out of the barn; the horse is dead, the barn burned down long ago, and there’s a strip club where the farm used to be.
