Pledge-O-Rama Returns April 19th through April 26th - dig deep and support great Campus & Community Radio in Winnipeg!

Listen Live

On-air now: Signal Distortion 3:00pm–4:00pm

Up next: Pastoral MIDI 4:00pm–5:00pm

Program Directory

Radio Survivor

Few top­ics cre­ate as much anx­i­ety at col­lege and com­mu­ni­ty radio sta­tions – not to men­tion many a com­mer­cial radio morn­ing show – than broad­cast inde­cen­cy. Since the dawn of broad­cast reg­u­la­tion in the US there have been legal restric­tions on the kind of speech that may be broad­cast on the pub­lic air­waves, with a par­tic­u­lar focus on the top­ics of sex­u­al and excre­to­ry func­tions. Yet, for all the wor­ry­ing and fret­ting, for much of his­to­ry there hasn’t been much action by the FCC. And even when there were more fines and actions, the actu­al num­ber was still rel­a­tive­ly small.

Prof. Christo­pher Ter­ry from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Min­neso­ta joins us to help unrav­el this his­to­ry and set the record straight. First we have to define what inde­cen­cy” is, because the spe­cif­ic def­i­n­i­tion used for broad­cast enforce­ment is not nec­es­sar­i­ly aligned with the com­mon sense def­i­n­i­tion, nor is it the same as obscen­i­ty,” which has it’s own par­tic­u­lar legal def­i­n­i­tion. Just because some might call a word obscene” doesn’t mean it nec­es­sar­i­ly is legal­ly obscene (in fact, it prob­a­bly isn’t), nor is it nec­es­sar­i­ly legal­ly inde­cent (thought it might be).

Then Prof. Ter­ry walks us through a long unevent­ful peri­od that ends in the 1970s with the very first inde­cen­cy fine and the Supreme Court deci­sion Paci­fi­ca v. FCC, which kicked off a forty year peri­od of increased enforce­ment and many more fines. Yet, in those four decades, the stan­dard of inde­cent shift­ed both due to polit­i­cal pres­sures and court inter­ven­tion. It leads up to 2018, when broad­cast new orga­ni­za­tions strug­gled with how to report on Pres­i­dent Trump refer­ring to some nations as s**thole coun­tries,” while still remain­ing compliant.

In the end, in 2021, it’s still the case that air­ing inde­cent” pro­gram­ming between 6 AM and 10 PM may get you an FCC fine, but the risks are dif­fer­ent than what you may have thought to be true one, two or three decades ago.