I’d like to see a cite for this. I’m just about 99.9% sure that there are no applicable fines for saying ‘shit’ on tv, especially if the FCC doesn’t receive any complaints. And I’m pretty sure I read that they didn’t receive any.
Also, fines typically increase with each repeated offense. Imagine if the fine for saying shit was a mere $50 but doubled after each infraction. Do you think they would waste that much money to say it 162 times?
I heard the “applicable fines” right here on this board. Perhaps I should have asked that person for a cite.
(But since you ask, I don’t know precisely how much $$ Parker and Stone would spend for this purpose, but I imagine they’d go pretty high. They have the money; why not put it back into the show?)
According to this, Howard Stern’s parent company paid out 1.715MUSD in 1995 alone for roughly 100 FCC fines.
If that is any indication then the average FCC fine would be along the lines of $17,150. Multiply that by 162 (the number of times ‘Shit’ was said on South Park) and you get $2,778,300. Parker and Stone may not be hurting for money but I doubt they’d drop more than a couple thousand on a single episode of South Park, much less 2.7 million.
Hm.
Well, the episode got on the air one way or another! If they didn’t drop 2.7 million, then what’s your theory?