When I am listening to the radio while driving in my car (FM, not satellite radio) I am constantly thrown for a loop when it comes to ‘bad words’ and whether or not a song will be censored to bleep out a particular word. I’ll listen to a song that says “ass” repeatedly without getting bleeped yet the very next song uses the word “head” in reference to sex and it gets censored.
On top of the seemingly arbitrary decisions on which words get bleeped and which don’t, the censorship isn’t even strictly enforced. Sometimes that song that says “ass” repeatedly will not get censored, then again sometimes it will. Just like “head” will be allowed on occassion too. Who, or what organization is responsible for determining and executing radio censorship? Because that censorship seems spotty at best and when it is enforced it appears oddly arbitrary.
The FCC can levy fines for obscenity (though they don’t directly “censor”).
You’re correct that the FCC’s enforcement of obscenity violations is seemingly arbitrary, it’s been the subject of a recent case before the Supreme Court.
Each station makes its own decision about the likelihood of complaints at that time of day and the likelihood of a heavy fine by the FCC. Frustratingly for station executives, the FCC will not give a hard-and-fast list of what’s acceptable and what isn’t, though there are now some guidelines about subject matter.
A few years ago driving around Miami I stumbled across a station that bleeped nothing, even from the most explicit rap songs, and there was a lot that was made quite explicit. The signal seemed awfully clear to be coming from an offshore pirate, so I still haven’t figured that one out.
FM radio is responsible to the FCC because as part of the public airwaves, the FCC controls licensing. The FCC can also issue fines if it deems that standards have been violated.
Whether four-letter words violate those standards have been controversial for decades. The landmark case is the 1978 Supreme Court decision FCC v. PACIFICA FOUNDATION, 438 U.S. 726 (1978) in which they ruled that the station’s playing of George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” violated the rules against “obscene, indecent, or profane” language. Oh, the irony.
The decision is hedged in various ways, but the real message was that the average adult wasn’t ready to hear dirty words on the radio. What’s legally important is that the decision did not create a law of any kind. It merely said that if the FCC wanted to fine a station for the playing of four-letter words after it received a complaint on the matter it could do so.
That left it entirely up to the station to make its own policy. Now multiply several thousand radio stations by a million songs by 34 years and you see that billions of decisions have to be made and consistency doesn’t enter the picture.
Moreover, the culture has changed profoundly in the past 30 years. Like it or not, the occasional use of a four-letter word in music is common and only a tiny, if vocal, minority of people are offended. The FCC is supposedly not a political organization but in reality the commissions are appointed by presidents and vote according to party affiliation. When Republicans are in power they tend to vote more conservatively and when Democrats are in power they allow more leeway. The famed Janet Jackson nipple incident is probably most famous of these. The fine against CBS for allowing this to air was later rescinded. For the moment, fleeting, inadvertent use of a four-letter word is not going to be punished.
But we’ll see. The Supreme Court just held hearings on the issue and will probably rule on it in a few months. So we’ll see.
ETA. While I was poking around the internet having fun reading, zombywoof made a quick post to the same link. So here’s another story to make up for it.
This would make sense as to why I’ve heard the same song get bleeped out one time on a certain station, then played without that bleep at a different time.
This sounds like it would be prior restraint, which has been roundly rejected by the Supreme Court.
Add to that the time-honored legal doctrine of “I’m Not Touching You!” or “Lawyers Are Going To (Rules-) Lawyer”: The moment the FCC does set down a hard-and-fast line, every station aimed at the 18-to-35 market is going to hug the right side of that line so close you won’t even be able to see daylight. And the 18-to-35 market is the market, even for radio. And, of course, you have stations like, say, Pacifica, who would see it as their duty to toe over the line and take it all the way to the Supreme Court.
So the FCC won’t let you be, but neither does it seem likely to spell out what the actual rules are.
I thought beyond all that has been said here there was the idea of community standards. So the rules for Los Angeles are different for Des Moines. Is this correct?
Community standards was a principle more workable decades ago, when communities were like individual nation-states and could construct their own sets of rules. Boston was notorious for its censorship board, which prohibited certain books and magazines from being sold. This made them valuable elsewhere, and the label “banned in Boston” was a selling point. Movies were subject to censorship boards all over the country, which could arbitrarily decide to cut a mine or scene before that movie could be shown locally. The very few national mediums were highly monitored. Radio and later television were terrified of offending anyone, although that was as much because advertisers owned or controlled whole shows and wanted to ensure that they never lost a possible customer. Magazines were sent via the U.S. mail to subscribers and laws allowed postal regulators to seize entire runs of magazines if they contained offensive words or pictures.
After WWII, the returning soldiers were less interested in having some very familiar four-letter words banned and more interested in seeing pictures of naked pretty girls. (How can you keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?" is from WWI but demonstrates the same broadening of provincial attitudes that was multiplied after WWII.) Modern media made the U.S. more of a nation than a pack of individual cities. Many groups starting fighting for fewer restrictions in all the media. The movie code started breaking down, and so did the force of the Catholic Church and its feared Condemned rating of movies. A number of Supreme Court cases made it legal to sell once banned books, like Tropic of Cancer. Discreet magazine nudes now could be mailed. Rock ‘n’ roll lyrics grew raunchier.
And all this was before the 60s. That tidal wave swept away almost everything except for radio and television. Then came cable, over which the FCC has no dominion whatsoever. Censorship is solely to please audiences and advertisers.
Prosecutors still tried. They set up dozens of obscenity cases, covering everything from magazines to comic books to porn films, and tried to make that claim that while other - heathen, liberal, commie, hippie, filth-ridden - communities might tolerate this stuff, their pure, decent, true American sensibilities stood above it. As the years went on, it became harder and harder to win a victory based on community standards. Even ordinary juries didn’t want to think of themselves as provincial hicks; “everything is up to date in Kansas City,” to quote another song line. The silliness never ends - cases involving the Internet have been tried on the grounds that they violated community standards - because of that vocal minority that votes for prosecutors who stage these stunts. Trying gets them points. They don’t have to win, and they rarely do. It’s more political theater today than actual law.
So, the short answer is that the rules for Des Moines are indeed the same as those for Los Angeles today and have been for a long time. It’s that darn globalization again.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard words on songs* bleeped* out. They just play the radio edit instead, which either has a gap in the vocal track, does that weird “backwards/scratched audio” effect, or substitutes a different word (cf “She ain’t messing with no broke, broke”).
So, it seems to me that the decision on what words are censored goes to whoever makes the radio edit of the song (or whoever at the radio station decides whether the radio edit should be played or the original is “safe” enough).
There are a few classic rock songs that were censored (or had a different version) - “Money” by Pink Floyd and “Big Old Jet Airliner” by The Steve Miller Band come to mind. In the early to mid '70s, the clean versions always were played on the radio, giving way gradually to the album versions by the mid '80s.
Then Janet Jackson showed her titty. Now, all the classic rock stations censor everything. It’s her fault.
I’m 100% sure I’ve heard the ‘Jet Airliner’ both ways, on live air (‘funky shit/kicks going down in the city’). Also, nearly 100% sure I have heard ‘Start Me Up’ (Stones) alternately with the line ‘you’d make a dead man cum’ and with that last line cut off or faded. I’ve lived in New York & Los Angeles - maybe it’s different in the Bible Belt.