FCC’s Profanity Ruling Thrown Out

From Broadcasting & Cable “FCC’s Profanity Ruling Against Fox Thrown Out“:

The court said the FCC’s “fleeting expletives” policy did not pass muster for “failing to articulate a reasoned basis for its change in policy.”…

The FCC found two Fox Billboard Awards show broadcasts to be profane, and thus indecent, because they allowed variants of the word “fuck” and “shit” to be broadcast outside of the FCC’s 10 p.m.-6 a.m. safe harbor for “indecent” broadcast speech.

Fox argued that neither of the broadcasts would have been found indecent under the previous almost 30 years of FCC indecency policy (1975-2004) and that “without adequate explanation or even acknowledgment, the FCC has abandoned the restrained understanding of indecency that served the public for three decades.”