- The Washington Post -
New Fines for Indecency
FCC Hits 'Without a Trace,' 'Surreal Life,' PBS Broadcast
By Steven Levingston
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 16, 2006; Page D01

The Federal Communications Commission yesterday proposed nearly $4 million
in fines for violating the agency's indecency standards, targeting a range
of TV programming from a hit CBS drama to Spanish-language broadcasts to a
PBS documentary on bluesmen.

...The FCC also found that the Martin Scorsese-produced documentary "The
Blues: Godfathers and Sons" was indecent because it aired profanity. Aired
on a non-commercial, educational channel in San Mateo, Calif., it contained
"numerous obscenities, including the F-Word, the S-Word and various
derivatives of those words," the FCC said. The station was fined $15,000.

Democratic FCC Commissioner Jonathan S. Adelstein dissented from the
decision on the documentary. He argued that the obscenities had a role to
play in fully depicting the culture and context of the blues world. "It is
clear from a common sense viewing of the program that coarse language is
part of the culture of the individuals being portrayed," Adelstein wrote in
a statement.

John Crigler, a communications lawyer with the D.C. office of Garvey
Schubert Barer, worried that the FCC was backing away from a tradition of
acknowledging context and news value in documentary programming and
establishing a rigid rule on words that are acceptable or not on the air.
"The list of bad words is no longer limited to seven," Crigler said. "The
commission is willing to proceed on the theory that there is some list of
words that is so shocking in nature that they will be presumptively indecent
regardless of the context."

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