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INTRODUCTION TO THE 2007 EDITION
- Rutgers University Press
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I N T R O D U C T I O N T O T H E 2 0 0 7 E D I T I O N March 2007: A Connecticut high school principal has just cancelled the performance of a student-composed theater piece about the war in Iraq. The students had already rewritten the script in response to administration concerns , removing graphic violence and “some things that reflect poorly on the Bush administration.”1 But the principal still disapproved. Barely a week before this story broke, the Supreme Court heard argument in a case involving a different sort of youthful expression. Alaska student Joseph Frederick had unfurled a banner reading “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” on a public sidewalk across from his school one snowy day in 2002 as the Olympic Torch Relay passed by. The principal punished Frederick for displaying a sign that she felt undermined the school’s anti-drug message. In its appeal to the Supreme Court, the school’s attorney argued that administrators should have authority to censor any student speech that contradicts official policy. Free speech—and free access to ideas—for children and teenagers are always hotly contested issues. Admittedly, not all the controversies involve matters as weighty as war or drug policy. But sex and fantasy violence—the more frequent concerns of those who would censor youth—also have a political dimension. With all of these pressing social issues, the stakes for children and adolescents are high. It is a good time for a new edition of Not in Front of the Children. In the pages that follow, I update several of the stories told in the book, and conclude with a word about the understandable concerns of parents in today’s mass media culture. T h e F C C a n d t h e “ F l e e t i n g E x p l e t i v e s ” R u l e December 19, 2006, may go down in judicial history as the day that judges freely said “fuck” and “shit” in a federal courtroom. The case was Fox Television v. Federal Communications Commission, and Peter Hall, one of three appellate judges, was questioning a young lawyer for the FCC about the agency’s broad claim of authority to censor “fleeting expletives” on the airwaves . Suppose that in radio or TV reports on this very case, Judge Hall asked, “the words ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ are broadcast over the news tonight? Is that going to be subject to FCC handslapping?” Judge Hall’s language choices were a calculated contrast to the argument of the FCC lawyer, who had used only the euphemisms “f-word” and “s-word.” No, the lawyer replied, the FCC is not in the business of second-guessing the editorial judgments of broadcasters. But on the other hand, news reports are not automatically immune from the FCC’s anti-indecency rules. This, alas, was just the sort of ambiguity in enforcement that had driven broadcasters to distraction for the past thirty years in trying to understand the FCC’s censorship scheme. December 19, 2006, may not have been the first time that a federal judge uttered “fuck” or “shit” in a courtroom. It was the deliberate nature of Judge Hall’s word choice that made the moment memorable. Overcoming taboos surrounding these words was exactly the point, and the fact that a judge—in fact, two of the three judges on the bench that day—were willing to do so gave hope to the anti-censorship forces arrayed in the courtroom. As chapters 4 and 5 of this book explain, the FCC derives its power to punish constitutionally protected but “indecent” expression on radio and broadcast television from a criminal law that bans “obscene, profane, or indecent ” language on the airwaves. In its Pacifica decision of 1978, the Supreme Court affirmed this power by a 5-4 vote. The FCC’s standard, as upheld in Pacifica, defines as indecent any expression that “describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory activities or organs.” The FCC used this “indecency” definition in 2001 to condemn the performance artist Sarah Jones’s rap poem, “Your Revolution,” after it was played on a community radio station in Oregon. “Your Revolution” attacks the misogyny of male-dominated rap music with such lines as “your revolution will not happen between these...