The studio at Q-101 where Mancow’s Morning Madhouse originates once had a single “dump button”–a switch that enables a producer to bleep dirty words during the seven-second tape delay that separates what gets said in the studio and what goes out on the air. Now it has two–Mancow himself works the second–and there are plans to install a third, which will be operated by a new employee whose sole responsibility will be to watch Mancow’s mouth for him. “We haven’t filled that position yet,” says Chuck DuCoty, vice president and general manager of the station. “But basically the job requires good reflexes and a knack for seeing things black-and-white in a world of gray.”
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Although he’s cleaned up his act considerably in recent months, Mancow is unrepentant about what he’s said and done on the air in the past and denounces the FCC’s new enthusiasm for censorship as a threat to civil liberty and artistic freedom. “This is the slippery slope,” he says. “It’s very hard to be creative, to be honest and expressive, when you have to double- and triple-guess yourself. The church I attend sings a hymn: ‘On Christ the solid rock I stand / All other ground is sinking sand.’ Well, they’re making us stand on sinking sand.”
Nowadays this looks pretty arbitrary. Cable TV and satellite broadcasting are also pervasive and accessible to children, but they enjoy full protection under the First Amendment. Michael J. Copps, the FCC commissioner whose torch against smut burns brightest, readily acknowledges this inconsistency, but he wants to fix it by expanding the FCC’s mandate to cover the newer media. “Eighty-five percent of homes get their television signals from cable or satellite,” he told members of the National Association of Broadcasters at a “decency summit” in March. “Most viewers, particularly children, don’t recognize the difference as they flip channels between broadcast stations and cable channels. Because cable and satellite are so pervasive, there is a compelling government interest in addressing indecency when children are watching.” It’s unclear whether Copps really thinks such a radical extension of the commission’s power is politically possible; lately he’s been backpedaling on this subject.
Female cast member: “No, but seriously this [Niagra] really works. I’m feeling Duncan Hines right now.”
Commissioner Copps has been calling for broadcasters to create a new code of ethics to replace the old one. Other decency watchdogs feel the industry can no longer be trusted to police itself. Last year, after Bono declared Gangs of New York “fucking brilliant” on the Golden Globes, Republican congressmen Doug Ose of California and Lamar Smith of Texas introduced a bill that would define profane language where it had never been defined before–in Title 18 of the U.S. Code–using an expanded version of Carlin’s list. It could well be the filthiest piece of legislation ever drafted: “As used in this section, the term ‘profane,’ used with respect to language, includes the words ‘shit,’ ‘piss,’ ‘fuck,’ ‘cunt,’ ‘asshole,’ and the phrases ‘cock sucker,’ ‘mother fucker,’ and ‘ass hole,’ compound use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms).” This actually seems rather narrow when you consider the above transcript.
The fairness doctrine went out of effect in 1987, another victim of Reagan deregulation, but that’s no reason to think that the FCC can now be trusted to regulate broadcast content. So far the current censorship drive has been limited to smut rather than political discourse, but what’s to prevent any given administration from selectively using the power to suppress indecency against a broadcaster whose real crime is airing legitimate criticism of its policies?
