Television Censorship

Significance: Television’s widespread presence in homes and its ready availability have made it a central fixture of censorship issues

Since television became widely available in the second half of the twentieth century, it has attracted a steady stream of critics. More than a few observers have doubted whether the various talents and interests responsible for television programming have made the medium anything other than a wasteland. Despite the fact that in the eyes of many critics, television has many channels but “nothing on,” attempts to control the content of television programming have arisen from many quarters. Government, television networks, advertisers, local stations, grassroots groups, and private individuals have all tried to censor television. Of attempts to control television, the role of government—at least in Western democracies—has generally been relatively minor. More significant have been the efforts of interests such as networks and advertisers. Networks and advertisers are motivated by the desire to attract and retain audiences. This desire has lead to a general policy of shunning controversy, which can alienate audiences and advertisers.

Although television censorship efforts have proceeded from several quarters, censorship efforts have tended to focus on a few areas. Since television’s inception the most common areas in which efforts to restrict television programming have centered have been violence, sexual conduct, and objectionable language. The 1990s saw renewed attention to the issue of television violence especially, which renewed attempts to recruit government to a more active role in regulating the content of television programming.

Television and Children

Children may summon television’s images and narration with the touch of a finger. Advocates of government restrictions on television have urged that since television—as does radio—reaches into the home and presents itself immediately to children, television should be subject to greater restriction than that to which the print media are subject; print media have traditionally been afforded far greater protections from attempted government regulation. Accepting the proposition that speech fit for adults might not be fit for children, the United States Supreme Court has generally been less protective of objectionable speech when young children are a part of an audience than when only adults are listeners. In Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation (1978), for example, the Court upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) power to sanction a radio station that aired during the afternoon a comic monologue by the comedian George Carlin laced with “adult” language. A key factor in the Court’s conclusion was its assumption that young children might be in the radio audience. It therefore held that the FCC was authorized to protect children from inadvertent exposure to indecent language, even when the language was not technically obscene. The presence of children in television audiences has also spurred efforts to enforce positive obligations on the part of programmers to include significant educational programming within their television schedules, such as the Children's Television Act of 1990. These kinds of programming obligations may be seen as a kind of censorship, since they prevent broadcasters from airing the content of their choice in favor of educational programming.

Government Regulation of Television

In the United States, the FCC is the federal agency charged by law with the task of overseeing matters relating to radio and television. The Federal Communications Act prohibits the FCC from censoring broadcast programming. In general, however, federal law requires the FCC to grant licenses for broadcasting in a manner calculated to serve the public interest and to review the content of broadcast programming for its adherence to this same standard. Accordingly, courts in the United States have found that neither the ban on censorship nor the First Amendment to the Constitution prevent the FCC from attempting to assure that television programming (and other broadcast programming) serves the public interest. The rationale for this is that there is a limited number of frequencies on which to broadcast; these frequencies are viewed as a public resource, like water or publicly owned land. The government, therefore, has the responsibility to allocate the resources of the airspace in a manner that serves the public interest.

The Federal Criminal Code prohibits the broadcast of “obscene, indecent or profane language” and thus in theory justifies sanctions leveled against broadcasting stations who air such language. In the years after the Supreme Court’s holding in Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation that the FCC could monitor—at least to some extent—broadcast indecency, the FCC generally took the position that only the seven words highlighted in the Pacifica case were forbidden, and then only if used repeatedly. When the FCC did seek to police indecent broadcasting, it tended to focus its censorial energies predominantly in the area of radio broadcasting rather than television programming. Occasionally, though, the commission sanctioned television stations for overstepping the bounds of decency. For example, in 1987 the FCC fined a television station for airing during prime time an R-rated film. The United States has not been alone in finding room among the government’s powers to oversee the decency of television broadcasting. In Great Britain, the Television Act of 1954 contained a provision banning programming offensive to good taste or likely to incite violence. Britain’s Obscene Publications Act of 1959 was extended to broadcast media in 1991, and it forbids the portrayal of actual sexual intercourse.

Following the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show controversy in 2004, when Janet Jackson's breast, which was covered with a nipple shield, was exposed for one second due to a wardrobe malfunction, debate about FCC control over broadcasting and indecency standards reignited. The FCC received more than a half million indecency complaints and fined the network CBS $550,000, which was ultimately voided by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in 2011. In response, several networks increased their broadcast delays of live programming by several seconds in order to enable broadcasters to edit out or cut away from scenes that could be considered inappropriate. The controversy also prompted the passage of the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2005, which increased FCC fines and penalties for networks that aired indecent or profane content.

In 2004, in response to the Super Bowl halftime show controversy, the FCC updated its policy to prohibit "single uses of vulgar words." In 2002 and 2003, Cher and Nicole Richie had used expletives during the Fox Network's broadcast of the Billboard Music Awards. Although the FCC had previously allowed isolated expletives during live broadcasts, the commission issued fines to Fox for broadcasting profane language, arguing that the policy on "fleeting" instances of profanity were merely staff letters that did not accurately represent FCC policy. In 2009, in a 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court upheld FCC regulations banning "fleeting expletives" on television in its ruling in FCC v. Fox Television Stations, Inc.. In the majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, "The FCC's new policy and its order finding the broadcasts at issue were neither arbitrary nor capricious." In a dissenting opinion, Justice Stephen G. Breyer argued that the FCC had failed to adequately explain why it had changed its policy and found that the fines issues to Fox were arbitrary and capricious. Despite the Court's ruling in favor of the FCC, the 2009 decision stated that "the court did not definitively settle the First Amendment implications of allowing a federal agency to censor broadcasts," thus returning that issue to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. A separate FCC v. Fox Television Stations, Inc. case, decided in 2012, found vague regulations on indecency to be unconstitutional but upheld the FCC's authority to issue and enforce nonvague regulations, in the public interest, without violating the First Amendment.

Broadcasting Safe Harbors

The critics of government attempts to purge the airwaves of indecent material in the interests of children have often complained that these attempts threaten to make children the measuring rod of all programming suitability. Concern for protecting children from broadcast material unsuitable for their age has sometimes been accompanied by recognition that child viewers of television tend to decrease as evening progresses. This social reality prompted the proposal that objectionable television programming be reserved for later hours of the evening, when most children have gone to bed. For example, in the United States, the television networks and the National Association of Broadcasters in the mid-1970s adopted a family viewing policy. This policy provided that programs aired from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. would be suitable for the whole family unless the networks provided a specific warning advising parents otherwise. In 1976, however, a federal district court found this viewing policy to be a violation of antitrust law. By the end of the 1980s, the FCC had itself created a safe harbor between midnight and 6 a.m., when indecent material might be broadcast so long as stations aired a warning concerning the offensive material. Shortly thereafter, however, the FCC—faced with increasing public pressure to restrict indecent programming—began to push for a ban on indecent programming until a federal appeals court ruled that such a ban would be unconstitutional. A year later, federal courts ruled that even the restriction of indecent material to the safe-harbor period of midnight to 6 a.m. was unconstitutional. The FCC relented somewhat in the face of this decision, but continued to enforce a ban on indecent programming from 6 a.m. until 10 p.m. Great Britain has also followed a similar pattern, treating 9 p.m. as a time after which programming unsuitable for children might be aired. Great Britain had enforced prior to 1957 the so-called toddlers truce between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m., when programming was expected to air with a special regard for children.

Censorship by Networks and Program Executives

Television censorship may take the form of enforced government prescriptions regarding the content of programming. More commonly, however, censorship occurs not as edicts descending from government but as self-imposed restrictions on programming. Thus, for example, Ed Sullivan required the Rolling Stones to change the lyrics of their song “Let’s Spend the Night Together” to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together” in the group’s 1967 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Similarly, the producer of the countercultural comedy show Saturday Night Live, though initially surprised by Sinead O’Connor’s guest appearance in October 1992, in which she tore up a picture of the pope, reasserted control when the program was reaired sometime later by substituting rehearsal footage in the place of the controversial episode. The Saturday Night Live program also illustrates the role of networks in television censorship. Over the years of its existence, Saturday Night Live’s writers and producers have regularly clashed with NBC’s censors and executives. In general, the power of networks over the producers of particular programming has declined as the networks have lost segments of their audiences to premium cable television, recording devices, and original programming produced by subscription services such as Netflix.

Censorship by Sponsors and Advertisers

In the early years of television, popular television series such as the Philco Television Playhouse and Kraft Television Theater were, as their names suggest, sponsored by a single company whose products were advertised during the course of the series. This close relationship between sponsor and series created ample opportunities for a sponsor to exert control over the content of a series. Thus, although this period of television programming has sometimes been called the golden age of television, the sponsors of the programs during this period have earned criticism for their successful attempts to mold programming to suit the tastes of their intended audiences. Once television programming escaped the concept of a single sponsorship in favor of multiple commercial sponsors, the power of any one sponsor was lessened.

Television Violence

A concern for television violence has existed practically since television became widely available. Attempts to articulate standards for violence have varied considerably. In 1991, New Zealand’s Broadcast Standards Authority issued a Code of Practices that cautioned against broadcasting the infliction of pain by unfamiliar methods or combining violence and sexual titillation. Great Britain’s Code of Practices, published in 1989 by the Broadcasting Standards Council, warned producers against including gratuitous violence to bolster the appeal of otherwise weak material. However, assessments of the suitability of particular scenes of violence for children have not remained static. In Britain, for example, James Bond films were originally classified for adult audiences only, but by the closing years of the twentieth century they might be deliberately broadcast for a family audience. In the United States, critics of television violence have sometimes targeted for protest cartoon violence—such as that inflicted by the cat and mouse duo Tom and Jerry, upon one another—that a previous generation had found more amusing than threatening.

In the United States, concern over violence on television has found expression since the beginning of television’s widespread availability in the 1950s. Congress held hearings on the effect of television violence on children during the mid-1950s, the early 1960s, and throughout most of the 1970s. Although the decade of the 1980s saw relatively little furor over this subject, a rising concern for reports of random violence in American society and reports of viewers copying events on television restored the issue of television violence to the public forefront toward the end of that decade. A five-year-old viewer of Beavis and Butt-head imitated the characters by setting his house on fire, killing his two-year-old sister. Two viewers of a film broadcast on television imitated a scene in which characters lay down in the middle of a highway to demonstrate their courage; both viewers were killed. Critics of government regulation pointed out that control of television violence would have done nothing to stop these copycat incidents, since Beavis and Butt-head airs on cable and the two who lay down on a highway were imitating a film rather than a television program.

One copycat incident that reached the courts resulted in a finding of no liability on the part of a television network. NBC broadcast a program in which a girl was raped with a plumber’s helper. Four days later several boys who had seen and discussed the program raped a nine-year-old girl with a coke bottle. A California appellate court ultimately held that NBC could not be found to have incited the boys to this action and thus could not be found liable.

By the beginning of the 1990s, the critics of television violence in the United States had gained sufficient influence to persuade Congress to make some beginning of a search for greater restrictions. Congress passed the Television Program Improvement Act of 1990, which created a three-year antitrust exemption for various broadcast media interests. This exemption allowed broadcast media to work together to produce voluntary guidelines for reducing the amount of violence on television. The concern over television violence reached a crescendo in the mid-19900 and ultimately influenced the Telecommunications Act of 1996, federal legislation requiring television manufacturers to begin equipping all televisions with a V-chip. The V-chip is intended to enable parents to identify television programs with certain categories of objectionable material—including television violence—and to block these programs from being displayed by televisions in their homes. Canadian television had already begun experimenting with use of the V-chip prior to its adoption in the United States. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 did not require television programmers to rate their programs, but many began efforts to do so voluntarily, favoring such voluntary action over continued government involvement in this matter. Opponents of the V-chip provision claimed that it would inevitably discourage programmers from including material that might cause parents to block a program, since advertising revenues would suffer from such a loss of viewers. Thus, these opponents argued, programmers would self-censor their broadcasts far more than previously.

Film Editing

Television programming includes not only programs created especially for that medium but films originally screened in cinemas. Films transferred from cinema to television are routinely edited to fit a film within a particular time slot. Television producers also routinely edit film with the aim of censoring objectionable elements. As is true for many forms of external censorship, the censorship of film transplanted to television has the effect of encouraging filmmakers to engage in self-censorship from the outset of their production efforts. Film producers with an eye on an eventual television market may choose to exercise restraint regarding objectionable elements so as to avoid later cuts by television producers over which they will have no control and which might threaten the coherence of their films.

International Cultural Concerns and Television

Television transmissions effortlessly penetrate national boundaries, both when broadcasters in one nation deliberately target another nation to receive television signals or when signals inadvertently spill over from one territorial sovereignty to another. Residents of the northeastern United States may watch Canadian television. Texans may receive signals broadcast from Mexico. French television viewers may catch shows from Germany. The encroachment of uninvited television programming has prompted some nations to seek ways of curbing what they see as threatening influences from beyond their borders. Especially in the light of technologies such as direct satellite broadcasting, nations lacking access of their own to this technology have not always been enthusiastic when made the recipient of either satellite television signals intentionally targeted for these nations or signals which have unintentionally spilled over from another target. Satellite television signals may be used to communicate propaganda from one nation to another. This potential has fueled arguments, most prevalent among nonindustrial nations such as Cuba and certain of the former Soviet bloc nations which lack satellite television technology themselves, that the recipient nations should have the right of program control and be entitled to prior authorization before being made the target of these television signals. India has launched efforts to control foreign broadcast signals by investing in an expensive receiving station intended to monitor broadcasts that penetrate India’s territory. A show such as Baywatch, for example, which features attractive young women in bathing suits, may be acceptable in the United States, but authorities in Iran have indicated that they are of a different opinion.

Nations fearful of being penetrated by unwanted television signals have used a variety of means to defend themselves. Certain television signals have been jammed, although newer satellite technologies increased the difficulty of jamming television signals. Trade agreements restricting the flow of television and film across national boundaries are also common. These agreements effect a kind of censorship, often in pursuit of cultural objectives. The two most common reasons proffered by nations seeking to restrict the availability of foreign television and film to domestic viewers are the risks of polluting the domestic culture with foreign influences and the competitive danger posed to domestic media producers by foreign competitors. Cultural censorship of television in the international context has many illustrations. For example, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) would not air the popular children’s television program Sesame Street in Britain because of objections to its foreignness. The BBC apparently determined that Sesame Street communicated predominantly American values and declined to allow British youth to be inculcated with these values.

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