Supreme Court to Decide If FCC Can Regulate ‘Fleeting Expletives’
The ability of the FCC to punish broadcast stations for airing “fleeting expletives” — the one-time blurting out of profanity on broadcast programming — is now in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court announced this week that it will hear a case in which a lower court ruled that the FCC’s new policy of penalizing one-time utterances of profanity was illegal under federal administrative law. CDT is concerned that the Supreme Court will reverse the trend of modern free speech precedent by increasing the Commission’s power to censor broadcast speech, rather than focus on federal administrative law, as the lower court largely did.
