"You can't say that on television!" Qualifying obscenities on television and radio Bad words and obscenities can get people into a great deal of trouble. From childhood we are taught that they are taboo in most situations, but it doesn’t take much time to realize that almost everyone knows exactly what they mean. Television and radio broadcasts carry a great deal of weight when it comes to obscenity transmissions. Congress has permitted the Federal Communications Commission to administratively carry out the restrictions against broadcast indecency, so defined in Title 18 of the United States Code, Section 1464. In sum, this section prohibits the utterance of “any obscene, indecent, or profane language by means of radio communication”, television and radio subsumed as forms of “radio wave” transmission. Since 1995, this section has not been enforced 24 hours a day. From 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., the FCC has accommodated the legal broadcast of indecent speech. In reality, indecent speech is not well defined by the FCC, vaguely deemed indecent if “the material…describe[s] or depict[s] sexual or excretory organs or activities”. The networks frequently push the limits of decency, itself an arbitrary concept defined in contrast to a vast array of standards. All said, indecent transmissions are becoming more and more for the ear of the beholder to judge. So exactly what is indecent? More so, what does this tell about our language’s ability to convey the morally corrupt, sexually perverse, and sociologically pathological? And always it must be asked, whose standards are being invoked? As long as I’ve been watching television, two obscenities, “ass” and “bitch”, have quickly made their way into widely distributed television and radio programs. These words have gotten rather watered down due to their overuse, so that even the softer synonyms of, “ass”, like “butt”, “rear” and “behind” have become quaint and almost childish. Since broadcast stations are not given a clear-cut standard for indecencies, some of them operate on the “better safe than sorry” platform. For instance, “balls” (in reference to the testicles), “God” (as in “God damn it”), and “dick” (need I say more?) are often censored in broadcasts when these words have not been defined as singularly offensive by the FCC. In my experience, the local television station KVOS (Bellingham, WA-Vancouver, BC) often bleeps such words out, even in the safe harbor period from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. However, KVOS (and perhaps other stations like it) seems to have no such discretion when it comes to racism and homophobia. In a KVOS broadcast of the movie “Sixteen Candles”, the character played by Anthony Michael Hall referred to his friend as a “faggot”, and on a subsequent broadcast of the movie “Silverado”, a character called another man a “nigger”. As well, the FCC seems to have no such discretion either. The FCC recently ruled that a broadcast on KNON in Dallas of the song, “I Want To Be A Homosexual”, was indecent only due to “repeated, explicit, and vulgar descriptions of sexual activities and organs”, not at all calling issue with the use of the words, “dikes”, “queer”, and, “faggot”, used in the song. Realistically, “poo”, “piss”, and, “screw”, (in reference to sex) should fall to the chopping block just as much as their racier counterparts. They represent the exact same depiction of sexual or excretory activities the FCC has their panties in a bunch about. “Gosh darn it”, seems to be a dull reduction of “God damn it”, something few young children could get away with saying. The media carry the weight that obscenities bear for most of society. When “shit” and “fuck” are censored (at least for the ears, since reading lips and contextual use clears things up pretty quickly), it reinforces for us that they are truly bad words. Should “faggot”, “nigger”, “dike”, and the like be bleeped as well? The phrase “the N-word” is creeping into common use, and this would be an indicator that its undesirable equivalent is being degenerated. In my opinion, these are terribly hateful words for society to be recycling as they are. I understand there is power generated when hate speech is embraced by those who are supposed to be damaged by it; “nigger” represents the greatest example of this. And I don’t think that merely bleeping out such words on television will do a single bit of good. But if words are removed at all from television (while their childish equivalents remain), shouldn’t hate speech be a candidate for omission? I fear my child thinking that “faggot” is alright to say on the playground much more than I fear them using “shit” at Grandma’s dinner table. J. Everett R.