WASHINGTON — For the first time in 30 years, the Supreme Court took up the issue of indecency on television and radio broadcasts Tuesday, and its leading conservatives made clear they would like to uphold an official crackdown on the use of expletives during daytime and early evening hours.
U.S. Solicitor General Gregory G. Garre said the strict regulation of broadcast TV preserved it as a "safety zone" for families with children, particularly in an era of unrestrained free-speech rules on the Internet and on cable and satellite TV. "Broadcast TV is the one place where Americans can turn on the TV at 8 o'clock and . . . not expected to be bombarded with indecent language," he said.
He was defending a 4-year-old policy of the Federal Communication Commission to impose heavy fines on broadcasters who put on the air even a single expletive. He referred to the banned language as "the F-word" and "the S-word."
"The F-word is one of the most graphic, explicit and vulgar words in the English language for sexual activity," he said. Broadcasters can be fined more than $325,000 for a single utterance of the F-word, even if it is blurted out by a guest on a live program.
Last year, the TV networks won a ruling from the U.S. appeals court in New York that blocked the FCC policy from being enforced on the grounds it was arbitrary and possibly a 1st Amendment violation.
But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Antonin Scalia dominated Tuesday's argument and strongly supported the FCC.
Roberts, who has two young children, referred to the use of the F-word by rock singer Bono at the Golden Globe Awards and Cher at the Billboard Music Awards. "Here is an awards show. Here is a celebrity. I want to listen to what they are going to say because I listen to their music," the chief justice said, portraying himself as the parent with "impressionable children" in the audience. "And he comes out with that," he said, referring to an expletive.
Scalia said he understood that foul words would be heard at a football or baseball game. "You don't have to have them presented as something that is normal in polite company, which is what happens when it comes out in television shows," he told a lawyer for the broadcast networks.
Scalia blamed television for "coarsening" public discourse. "I am not persuaded by the argument that people are more accustomed to hearing these words than they were in the past," he added.
