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Legal News

: Lawbeat

Indecent? Obscene? Whatever.

By Mark Obbie

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Call me Mr. Picky. But I wonder if this dumb mistake would have been made if Fox News covered the Supreme Court regularly, or had legally smart producers reading copy before it's published or aired. In this Web report, Lee Ross confuses obscenity with indecency in a report on whether the Supreme Court will hear the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" case. Lee refers to "the supposedly obscene flash" of Jackson's breast, a mistake repeated in the story's deck headline. Lee later refers to indecency, but he never defines it and leans on a jargony quote to handle the heavy lifting:

The Third Circuit ruled the "First Amendment precludes the FCC from sanctioning CBS for the indecent expressive conduct of its independent contractors..."

As any undergrad taking media law could tell you, legal obscenity is an entirely different thing. If Jackson and Justin Timberlake had sex on camera, that might well have been declared obscene. Indecency is a standard applied only to FCC licensees for much milder stuff. It's a common mistake -- but one that you'd hope the top-rated cable news operation would make. Especially when the semantic difference really lies at the heart of the case: whether it's constitutional to punish a form of expression simply because it's aired on broadcast TV rather than in another medium.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on February 20, 2009 (boomark / email).