Lawyers used to joke that free speech includes the right to shout "fuck" in a crowded theater. But can Bono shout "fuck" at a crowded awards ceremony? Does the First Amendment still mean, as the late Justice John Marshall Harlan once wrote, that "the State has no right to cleanse public debate to the point where it is grammatically palatable to the most squeamish among us"?

Next term the Supreme Court will hear Federal Communications Commission v. Fox Television Stations, which pits aggressive puritans in the Bush Administration against aggressive sleazemongers in the Murdoch empire. But the stakes for American culture are much higher than the party lineup would suggest; at issue is whether a government bureaucracy is the legal arbiter of what is "legitimate" news coverage or "genuine" art.

In 1973 a progressive New York radio station broadcast a George Carlin monologue on "the seven words you can never say" on the public airwaves (in current FCC parlance, those would be "the S-word, the P-word, the F-word, the C-word, the C-sucker word, the M-F word and the T-word"). A member of a "decency in media" organization filed a complaint. The FCC disciplined the station for violating a federal statute that forbids broadcast licensees from transmitting "any obscene, indecent, or profane language by means of radio communications." The Court held that the commission could not totally ban speech like Carlin's, but it could require broadcasters to transmit it late at night, when it is unlikely children would be listening.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.