NEWS: The Buttocks are Not a Sexual Organ: ABC and the FCC

The religious right has well organized campaigns of complaints of indecency to the FCC. Imagine if the free expression movement were as well organized in opposing this censorship.

Maaaan, that was on network tv?

*walks down the street....wow every person has an ass, as do most other animals.

More then anything else , the one thing I hate about my countries ideas concerning censorship , is the double standard that nudity is evil but violence is not so bad . I never understood it when I followed stories about what was cut out of movies to get a R instead of a X , & I still don't get it . I guess I'm just not a fan of censorship in general . I feel the more truth that is out there available to be seen by everyone , the sooner we can all work out our differences . And that truth includes the fact that we all have genitals . Deal with it America , please .

I'm still surprised people finds butts offensive. Hilarious, sure. Attractive, depends on the person. But seriously, everyone has one. What's so offensive about that?

i love the most recent comment on the youtube video of that

hahaha! listen to the kid, people!

If banning butts from TV means Bill O'Reilly won't be showing his face on it anymore, I'm all for it.

Calvin: I wonder why other animals don't wear clothes.
Hobbes: If our naked pink butts showed, we probably would.
Calvin: Our butts are just fine!

At we don't have to watch people being murdered on Network TV, because that would truly be heinus.

If the buttocks is not a sexual organ, then Dorsal is in trouble. How can you not find her ass sexy?

Seriously though, how can you be offended by looking at a butt on TV? If they are going to disallow this instance of a butt, then I don't want to see any diaper commericials with a baby's bare butt in it if the buttocks is a "sexual organ" and is deemed "offensive," before 10:00 PM. This hits on both the "sexual" and "execretory" as we all know what a diaper is used for.

And if this was such a big deal, why deal with it 5 years after the fact? Does the FCC apply to all television or only over the air broadcast television? If it applies to all television, Sir Mix A Lot, Wrecks N Effect, and The Black Eyed Peas and any channel that aired their videos better watch out because they have a lawsuit coming their way.

When ABC showed Andy Sipowicz's (Dennis Franz) ass it may not have been obscene however, it was ugly.

Not that I agree with the FCC's stance, but this is pretty standard lag time for administrative hearings of this scope. The Bono "fucking excellent" fleeting expletive case from 2002 just got resolved last year, for example.

I remember watching this episode when it first aired (huge NYPD Blue fan) and the scene in question was like the first two minutes of the show. I remember thinking at the time, "CAN THEY SHOW THAT?!?"

So, yeah ... it was definitely a little risqué for prime time TV, but handing down a fine five years after the fact? Give me a break.

Then why did Janet Jackson's nipple get such a quick response? If I recall correctly, they fined CBS out the wazoo within a matter of months.

To be fair, that's a bit more than some butt cheeks. In one of those shots, had the lighting been different, you would have seen nipple.

Not that I agree with the FCC, but NYPD Blue has shown ass for years and not caught any flak for it.

Why is a nipple any more extreme than a butt cheek?


Ok, ok, I know, it's just the world we live in. But man. Retarded.

In contrast, the FCC lost regarding Bono's use of "fucking" back in '02, and:

By some analysis, the FCC's authority over broadcast TV itself may be in question, since IIRC it was founded largely upon broadcast TV being ubiquitous and unalterable by the viewer back in the 1950s, when there were no alternatives. That is not true now in either case. Federally mandated television V-chip technology is now commonplace, so parents can exclude inappropriate programming if they feel like it. Equally importantly, more US households get their TV through cable now and not through broadcast.

Both of these developments put the basic reasoning of the FCC's regulation of indecency in question. It will be interesting to see if Martin's right wing hardline ends up getting the FCC's power of enforcement limited or revoked entirely in the future.

And that's worse than half of the violent imagery on network TV how? Seriously you can turn on CSI or something and see all manner of dead bodies, but God forbid you see a nice ass and some side boob. Its a human body, and not a bad looking one if I may say so. Why, in the 21st century, are we as a country still so hung up over nudity and sexuality. I'd be far more worried about a kid getting ideas from violent programming than I would of a kid getting ideas about a naked blonde. The latter is just part of growing up anyway.

Now having watched the clip I am very surprised this made it to network TV and have no understanding of why it took the FCC 5 whole years to get pissed about it. Ridiculous.

Kinda. Administrative agencies are intended to be bureaucratic. I should say I'm certainly no expert on the standard timeline of FCC actions, but in general administrative actions are a lot like trials. Sometimes they take a long time. Sometimes they take a really long time. There isn't necessarily anything nefarious about it.

That said, here they just recommended a ruling. That means they had to give notice in advance and wait for public and party comments in advance of this. In other words, I seriously doubt that this was the first ABC heard of this. This did not come out of the blue to them, I'm sure.

Yes, and very much so. Here, they still have to finalize the ruling, which can then be appealed, which will then take plenty of time on top of that. I'm sure ABC isn't sweating it. The way things are shaping up in the presidential elections, the next adminstration (be it McCain or Obama/Clinton) will likely be more lax with these types of actions than Bush was.

Again, I'm not an expert on FCC jurisdiction, but I do know that part of their jurisdiction was based on the idea of the airwaves as a public trust. Even though broadcast TV doesn't have the same market penetration as it once did, that doesn't mean it's not still possible for you to throw up a pair of rabbit ears and tune in to the Big 34 networks. Moreover, there's a sort of precedential issue at play here. The FCC has asserted jurisdiction over broadcast issues for a half-century. I doubt that courts would be in a hurry to rock that boat too drastically for a few excesses of power here and there.

Finally (again, not that I'm arguing for the FCC here), but the Bono incident is easily distinguishable from this one. With the Bono incident, the FCC was punishing broadcast networks for so-called "fleeting expletives" that weren't planned or anticipated in advance. There was an obvious fundamental unfairness to such a punishment that the courts seized on to reverse the FCC ruling. The network hadn't intended to air such an obscenity, so why should they be punished for it?

By contrast, this here was clearly an intentional action on the part of the network. They wanted to show some ass (and some fine, fine ass at that.) They did. So the FCC doesn't have to get around the "fleeting expletive" hurdle, they just have to show that this chick's sweet hindquarters offended common standards of decency.

Fucking aye.