On Saturday, at the first baseball game in Boston after a suspension of the one that was scheduled to be played as city police and federal officials were hunting for Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, David Ortiz declared at a pregame ceremony, “This is our fucking city. And nobody gonna dictate our freedom. Stay strong. Thank you.” Normally, this is the kind of thing that would have invited a fine, but Federal Communications Chairman Julius Genachowski tweeted on the agency’s official account: “David Ortiz spoke from the heart at today’s Red Sox game. I stand with Big Papi and the people of Boston.”

It was an apparently inconsistency with agency policy that lead Lawyers Guns and Money blogger Erik Loomis to note: “It would be nice if the FCC would more generally assume people are grown-ups and allow the language used in everyday life to be part of mass media on a more general basis. I’m not sure that reserving the word for political occasions where the agency’s head deems it appropriate has much value.”

He may not precisely get his wish. But the good news is that the FCC is opening up comments “on whether the full Commission should make changes to its current broadcast indecency policies or maintain them as they are.” As Eriq Gardner explains further in The Hollywood Reporter:

According to an advance copy of a document set to be published on Friday in the Federal Register, the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau and the Office of General Counsel is seeking comments on whether it should maintain current protocol or change with the times on issues including isolated expletives on TV and fleeting instances of non-sexual nudity. The call for comments will surely invite attention from broadcasters who have fought several high-profile legal battles in recent years. Broadcasters believe that it’s time for a change.

In 1978, in FCC vs. Pacifica Foundation, the Supreme Court took a look at comedian George Carlin’s famous monologue, “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television” and considered the government’s role in regulating indecency over the public airwaves. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens upheld the FCC’s authority while preaching some vague restraint. “We simply hold that when the Commission finds that a pig has entered the parlor, the exercise of its regulatory power does not depend on proof that the pig is obscene,” he wrote.

This is a significant opportunity to reassess an area of broadcast policy that’s shifted back and forth over time and that observers on every side of the debate have found frustrating. It’s an area where I’ll almost be as curious to read the comments and see how they break down as to see where the final ruling lands, particularly given our current debate over the impact of depictions of violence in the media on real-world acts of violence. And I hope one area of the conversation that emerges is the relative treatments of sexual content, sexual violence, and other categories of violence. If parents really believe that violent media has an enormous real-world effect on their children, I’d expect to see more people writing in to suggest that depictions of violence be treated with similar care and suspicion as depictions of nude bodies or consensual sexuality. And I hope we can have a discussion about the actual relative harms of these depictions, and of fleeting language, uttered in instances in which public figures behave a lot more like human beings than most of the people we actually see on television.

It’s bizarre to watch the Supreme Court’s decision in its fleeting obscenities case today get reported as some sort of victory for broadcasters. Yes, the court, in a decision written by Anthony Kennedy, voided three Federal Communications Commissions decisions against Fox and ABC, declaring that the FCC hadn’t given the networks proper prior notice that the things they broadcast—two incidences of expletives spoken, unscripted, by stars during awards broadcasts and seven seconds of female nudity from behind—could be considered obscene. It’s a nice reprieve for Fox and ABC, but the Court decided it didn’t need to address the First Amendment issues involved. The does nothing to change what networks can broadcast or the FCC’s general ability to determine what’s obscene. As the Parents Television Council pointed out in a statement on the ruling, there are 1.5 million pending indecency cases that the FCC, because it did give proper prior notice to those broadcasters, is now free to rule on.

But the decision does reveal how capriciously the FCC behaved during the period when these penalties were assessed.

“The Govern­ment argues instead that ABC had notice that the scene in NYPD Blue would be considered indecent in light of a 1960 decision where the Commission declared that the ‘televising of nudes might well raise a serious question of programming contrary to 18 U. S. C. §1464.’,” Kennedy explained. “An isolated and ambiguous statement from a 1960 Commission decision does not suffice for the fair notice required when the Government intends to impose over a $1 million fine for allegedly im­permissible speech.” Well, no kidding, but it’s amazing that the commission was brazen enough to think that would cut it. Particularly given, as Kennedy notes, “a Commission ruling prior to the airing
of the NYPD Blue episode had deemed 30 seconds of nude buttocks ‘very brief’ and not actionably indecent in the context of the broadcast.” That the Commission didn’t acknowledge that is testament to either sloppy work and ignorance of its own precedents, or a conviction that the FCC can dramatically change tack at will.

That isn’t to say that new commissioners won’t be more rigorous and less capricious. But Kennedy did insist that “There is no need, however, for an agency to provide de­tailed justifications for every change or to show that the reasons for the new policy are better than the reasons for the old one.” It’s a sentiment that should unnerve both decency advocates and those of us who’d like to see more creative freedom for television writers.

In the meantime, I’d love to see more shows do what Parks and Recreation and Southland do: write dialogue that reflects how adults actually speak to each other in times of stress and excitement and pain and love, and bleep as necessary. It’s a workaround that avoids the—oh, the horror—prospect of expanding a child’s vocabulary in an instant, while acknowledging the adulthood of the target audience—and it’s a nice little rebuke visual rebuke to the confused standards we have today, a reminder that the FCC thinks the sight of Leslie Knope uttering the occasional obscenity is a threat.

Predictably, but ludicrously, NBC has already apologized for M.I.A.’s bleeped use of the word “shit” in a verse during last night’s Super Bowl halftime show and for her flipping the bird in a gesture so fleeting it barely registered during the sound and the fury and the chariot bearers and the church choirs. I profoundly wish they hadn’t. The incident was so fleeting that to argue it impacted innocent children doesn’t just strain credulity but snaps it. And groveling to the forces who are massing to make hay of a minor slip gives unfortunate credibility to decency mavens everywhere, who are complaining that it violates Madonna’s promise to have a clean show (a promise she essentially kept in her own performance) and to argue that it’s clearly a legitimate controversy because lots of people have written about it in a scramble for post-Super Bowl page views.

I’ve always thought M.I.A. could be sort of irritating in her striving to be controversial, but I also assume that combination of pop-culture it-girl factor and rebelliousness is precisely why she ended up on the bill with Nicki and Madonna. Flipping off a fairly distant camera in a busy shot during a performance with a lot of pelvis bumping seems entirely consistent with that image. NBC got what they paid for, a well-executed performance with a frisson of danger, and I’m not sure why they should be sorry for that.

And NBC shouldn’t take seriously the idea that artists shouldn’t be allowed fleeting obscenities, or that obsessive monitoring outweighs creative and mildly risky programming. The publication of articles about the fact that M.I.A. did something entirely in character is not the same thing as demonstrating that harm came from her performance. In the absence of any remotely compelling evidence to the contrary, I seriously doubt that millions of American families are going to have to have tough conversations over their orange juice this morning about what that thing that lady did on stage means and why we don’t do it in polite company.

If they do, part of that conversation should include the fact that sometimes people gets excited or overwhelmed and act out, and that self-control is an important thing, whether you’re Meryl Streep getting overcome during the Golden Globes and letting an obscenity slip or M.I.A. on a Super Bowl stage getting caught up in the excitement. Humanity is a rough, obscene thing, and this is one of the gentlest possible ways of dealing with it—certainly much more gentle than the New Yorker story about the sexual assault and murder of toddler James Bulger by two ten-year-olds, which I read not knowing what I was getting into when I myself was ten, and which left me gravely shaken for months. By the time children are old enough to understand obscenity and indecency in all their forms, they’re also nigh-impossible to protect entirely. The issue is not preventing them from seeing anything, but giving parents the tools to discuss whatever their children might encounter in a meaningful and supportive way.

And frankly, if parents are going to take on the futile quest of establishing a zero-tolerance policy against anything that might potentially get obscene, it makes no sense that they’d allow their children to watch the halftime show in the first place. Justin Timberlake’s exposure of Janet Jackson’s breast (something for which she was unfairly pilloried) was, to at least half of that duo, a shocking and unexpected accident. Prince may not have gotten naked, but his guitar-and-groin silhouette made a sexual statement on a vastly larger and clearer scale than M.I.A.’s finger against a busy background. Bruce Springsteen, who may be extremely sexy but is hardly a legendarily lewd performer, crotch-slammed a camera. The Super Bowl halftime show has a well-established reputation for being a place where people like to get a little controversial and even if they don’t plan it, do so by accident. And the game itself is a violent spectacle in which men are sometimes injured in a way that’s uncomfortable to watch and to discuss, even for adults.

If I were worried about my kids, promises or no, I’d keep them away, particularly in a year that featured performers famous for taboo-defying performances that suggest oral sex; a singer with a blow-up doll persona; and singer famous for being a a global-citizen authority-bucker who has been criticized for her praise of the Tamil Tigers, all of whom were announced in advance and all of whom are exceedingly Googleable. Kids who are young enough to be damaged by their first exposure to a fleeting obscenity or gesture probably shouldn’t be up late enough on a school night, and if kids are staying up because they’re already passionate Madonna, Nicki Minaj or M.I.A. fans, nothing in that performance was something they wouldn’t have absorbed from the music.

Whether it’s Prohibition, SOPA, or efforts to crack down on Janet Jackson’s nipples, policies that try to get to zero on things that most of adult society is either not horribly offended by or rather invested in having access to are doomed to failure. In particular, in a world with wildly differing standards, you’re never going to get society to protect you or your children from everything you find harmful—that’s work you have to do on your own, even if it means opting out. Whether you’re really willing to do that is a good test of how far your commitment extends.

This makes me exceedingly happy: CBS just bought a recession-themed sitcom pilot from Louis C.K. and Spike Feresten. Not a lot of details yet on anything other than the fact that that the show will apparently be about “young people who are trying to achieve their creative dreams.” But I’d follow C.K. into a burning building at this point if he promised me that content was inside it and I’d get to consume it before I succumbed to smoke inhalation.

I also think this is an interesting experiment in whether C.K.’s deeply compelling brand of honesty and moral comedy can find a mass audience, and whether he can do it without the explicitness that’s made Louie such a wonderful discussion of sex and gender from a man’s perspective. I hope the former will be true — I’d love to see a show that combines the sometimes-painful optimism of something like Parks and Recreation with the class consciousness of Raising Hope and the lived-in friendships of Happy Endings do well. On the second, while C.K. may (outside of race) get the most attention for his routines about sex and sexual humiliation, his up-front approach to things like buying a house, or having his daughters prefer their mother to him, or professional failure would translate extremely well to the networks without requiring him to compromise the material at all.

I’d also really like a show from him (or really, from anyone) to continue the trend that Southland started of having the characters talk like real people of those backgrounds and in those circumstances would, but bleeping them out. We’ve seen a bit of this on Parks and Recreation, where the generally clean-spoken characters occasionally lapse into real-world profanity, and on other shows, but I think it would be decent practice to do a bit more of it. Television doesn’t just capture characters in the least-stressful moments of their lives — quite the reverse. I can understand why we’ve got some limitations on speaking words aloud in prime time (even though I think its the job of parents to keep their kids away from content they find generally objectionable), but I think it would make sense to find a compromise that keeps the kiddies’ ears clean while trusting adults to know what’s really being said.

At Showtime’s panel for Shameless this morning, John Wells (who gets his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame today) suggested that the aperture of network television has narrowed such that he wouldn’t be able to sell some of his most popular shows today.

“It took us a long time to sell West Wing and it would be increasingly impossible now. You would take it to cable,” he said, suggesting that he also wouldn’t have been able to get China Beach on the air. “We never would have been able to sell ER…I can tell you that even at the time it was turned down by all the major broadcast networks twice before we actually got NBC to make it.” But he suggested that the combination of a return to profitability and the rise of smart, sophisticated storytelling on cable might pry the doors open again. “I’m hopeful about the network business,” he said. “They’re starting to see the competition for high-end programming, programming that’s going to be watched by a more sophisticated and affluent audience, that they have to compete with cable. I find it to be a very good time to have ideas that are different.”

He also suggested that even if the Supreme Court declined to overturn the rules against indecency on network television, the key to pushing the boundaries was to provide clear context and emotional basis for both events and language, pointing to ER as an example.

“We spent a lot of time intentionally pushing against where we knew the fence to be because we knew the audience was ready for more than what the government was prepared for us to do,” Wells said. “The audience is always very prepared to accept something that is done within the context…It was an episode I wrote and directed in which Anthony Edwards was dying and fell out of bed and started screaming ‘Shit!’ because he was so frustrated with where he was in his life…We didn’t get a single letter because the context, people understood.” In a different philosophy than that laid out by CBS Entertainment president Nina Tassler and 2 Broke Girls executive producer Michael Patrick King yesterday, Wells questioned indecency for indecency’s sake. “Is the audience going to understand what we’re trying to get at, or are we trying to inflame or do the thing that you do in elementary school where you wave around words and try to get a reaction?” he asked.

Wells also spent some time discussing the role of Ian Gallagher, the young gay character on Showtime who is not just romantically, but sexually active. He said that Cameron Monaghan’s turning 18 meant that Shameless would be able to be somewhat more explicit about Ian’s sex life without having to worry about violating federal child pornography laws. And Wells said he’d been touched by how the story had resonated with young gay teenagers who told him and Monaghan that they appreciated how the show reflects the complexity of their lives. Especially given the role of Roscoe on Showtime, it will be interesting to see if the network is digging in as a grittier alternative to shows like Glee, which focus more on the emotional lives of teenagers than the details of their sex lives. That’s not to say that you’ve got to be explicit to explore emotion, but it’s true that sometimes the details of sexual experience (or of exploring gender identity) do create specific emotional reactions, and it’s nice to have a commitment to exploring that.

The bridge is yours.

-Great background on and analysis of the decency case argued before the Supreme Court yesterday.

-For Downton Abbey fans, this piece about Virginia Woolf’s relationship with her cook is a fascinating read.

-We are, apparently, getting an Into the Woods movie.

-As usual, Caitlin Flanagan makes with the totalizing, but there is interesting stuff in her review of Blue Nights.

-Why is Hollywood suddenly so nuts for Linda Lovelace?

The bridge is yours.

-The only reason I’m sorry to be in California is the Supreme Court is hearing arguments in its broadcast decency case today. Let’s hope the decisions are as amusing as the video games case.

-Apparently, being a radio host means you have to be more sedate than a blogger. Who knew?

-Rick Santorum signals support for stronger copyright protections, if not SOPA.

-The Pawnee City Council race just got even more adorable.

-Tom Hanks will make us a web television series because why not.

-Yes, this is pretty much how I feel about New Girl:

It’s pretty unfortunate that Questlove’s getting bombarded with racist insults after making the equally unfortunate decision to choose “Lyin’ Ass Bitch” as Michele Bachmann’s intro music when she appeared on Jimmy Fallon. But I think his explanation of his reaction to the uproar is sort of revealing:

The musician revealed that the decision to play the 1985 track wasn’t mulled over for very long. “It wasn’t like a chess move where you have to think 12 steps ahead; you’re just, like, ‘Fuck, all right, I’m gonna do it,’ in a kamikaze-type way,” he admitted. “And I really didn’t think about how it could be perceived as a misogynist swipe — it didn’t hit me until my [Twitter] timeline started showing up that it was seen that way. I was like, Fuck, I forgot ‘Bitch’ is actually in the title.”

I mean, first there’s the fact that “bitch” isn’t just in the title. The song lyrics refer to the titular woman as a “little slut,” in addition to a “little lyin’ ass bitch.” It’s a song about a really horrible-sounding woman, and it doesn’t exactly go easy on her, whether accusing her of emotional manipulation or sexual infidelity (I tend to think Bachmann’s career is built around the former, but I don’t think she’s guilty of the latter). You have to try pretty hard to miss the language if you’re already choosing the song to be a stinging rebuke to the person who’s entering to it.

Second, I think there’s something really strange about the insistence that “bitch” is a neutral term, something you can just miss when picking out a song, that of the more serious profanities, it’s the one that networks can use without bleeping out. I don’t think the fact that the insult has sexist origins means that no one should use it ever. But I think denying those sexist origins (as some folks did when we last discussed profanity and entertainment here — I’m not saying Questlove did this) doesn’t makes a lot of sense. And there’s something decisively strange about the fact that a gendered insult that’s meant to degrade women by comparing them to animals or to degrade men by comparing them to women is considered less obscene than other profanities.

The bridge is yours.

-I’m not a huge short story person, but the new Don DeLillo sounds fantastic.

-Michael Fassbender has ideas for a new X-Men movie, but I just want to see Wolverine fight the Spanish Civil War.

-I wonder what it would mean for TV storytelling if the Supreme Court dramatically limited indecency regulation.

-The IMDb age discrimination suit heats up.

-I can retire now. I have everything I’ve ever wanted:

With arts and public broadcast issues percolating on the edge of the race for the 2012 presidential race, I thought it made sense to look at where the declared and prospective candidates for president have stood on arts issues throughout their careers. Their views on everything from arts education to intellectual property rights to support for local artistic traditions say a lot about how they value culture — but also about how they think about the role of government.

Rep. Ron Paul’s a libertarian, so it’s no surprise that he’s not fond of government funding for the arts. But true to his libertarian principles, he’s shown that he’s uncomfortable with government regulation of the arts more generally:

1997: Predictably, Paul was in the midst of some of the debates over the existence of National Endowment for the Arts after he returned to Congress in 1997. “It is clear that there is no place in the federal budget for the NEA, the NEH or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” he said after President Clinton asked for an increase in NEA and CPB funding in response to Congressional cuts the previous year. Later that year, he voted to disband the agency altogether.

2001: In a profile, Paul used the National Endowment of the Arts to illustrate his vision of the Constitution’s limits on government functions in an interview with Insight on the News: “If you say, ‘What we must do is cut back on the National Endowment for the Arts,’ instead of defending the constitutionally correct position that there should be no National Endowment for Arts, you have conceded. The Congress made a feeble intellectual attempt in 1995, but it failed because, all of a sudden, the constitutional principle spelled out clearly in the 10th Amendment was ignored. The 10th Amendment says: ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’”

2004: Paul was the only Republican to vote against a bill that increased the ceiling on Federal Communications Commission indecency fines from $27,500 per incident for companies and $11,000 for individuals to $500,000, complaining “I’m convinced that the Congress has been a very poor steward of the First Amendment.”

2007: Paul may not believe that the federal government should fund the arts, but that doesn’t mean he dislikes them. He cosponsored a resolution that expressed the House’s support for music education as part of a balanced curriculum.

Support for arts education shouldn’t necessarily be interpreted one way or another, unless the candidate in question is Mike Huckabee, for whom it’s a top issue. And other than that simple resolution, Paul’s views on the arts are straightforwardly libertarian.