Virtually everyone in the broadcast-ing business recognizes the FCC's crackdown on fleeting profanity and indecency for what it is-a knee-jerk reaction to pressure from their bosses in Congress. Bono swears, Janet strips. Congress fulminates and the commission reverses over two decades of consistently light-handed indecency regulation. The industry is also pretty much in agreement that in its haste to please Capitol Hill, the commission switched gears without providing sufficient notice or justification to the industry. That is against the law. But that is where the agreement ends. For instance, ABC, CBS, and NBC are taking dead aim at the legal underpinnings not only of indecency rules but of content regulation of the broadcast media in general. Fox, meanwhile, has concentrated on the idiocy of indecency regs, while the lobby for some well-known independent TV producers does not challenge the FCC's authority to regulate content. In its filing on NYPD Blue, the lobby took pains to avoid challenging either the Supreme Court's Pacifica or Red Lion decisions, which together have provided the foundation of FCC content regulation.
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