Strange times we live in, making decisions of taste almost impossible, if you're trying to please everyone.Toby Keith provided radio a month ago with an (1) unedited, (2) edited, (3) bleeped and (4) "vegetables" version, which wasn't enough for CMT, which created a fifth (fade) version (5).
Five versions may be an all time record for the country format!
In the wake of Whitney Duncan's ‘Survivor: South Pacific’ antics, Luke Bryan's covering the CMA Awards for "Ellen" more thoroughly than he covers his "Country Girl, Shake It For Me" dancers and Zac Brown long ago proving that you can say the word "ass" on national TV, isn't this ado over "testicles" a bit overblown?
Mike OMalley and I are usually for playing unedited versions, but M O'M points out that 'vegetables' is actually funnier.
In short, we've been telling clients to opt for either the edit (ass) or clean (no ass). In any event, no beep.
The radio axiom "what you don't play will never hurt you," certainly still holds, though dead air is definitely not an audience-builder when compared to 3,155,434 views on You Tube!
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Groups want Supreme Court to strike down “seven dirty words” ruling. Five tech policy groups that don’t always see eye to eye are sounding off on the pending Supreme Court case over indecency. The groups side with several broadcasters, and say current FCC regulations amount to censorship, and want the Court to broaden the case beyond fleeting expletives and strike down all regulations — including the so-called “seven dirty words” decision. That 33-year old 5-4 ruling is based on “an archaic and unrealistic conception” of television and radio according to TechFreedom, Public Knowledge, the Cato Institute, the Center for Democracy & Technology, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The 1978 decision based on Pacifica’s WBAI, New York (99.5) airing of George Carlin routine looked at indecent content as an “intruder into the home.” But the policy groups from both sides of the political spectrum argue that thinking is based on “relics of a bygone technological era” and over-the-air broadcasting is just one of countless ways Americans access content. “Speech that is broadcast should be extended the same full First Amendment protection that this Court has afforded speech on the internet,” they write in the 39-page petition. The Supreme Court has said it will take up a decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that threw out the FCC’s fleeting expletive indecency rules as “unconstitutionally vague.” No date has been set for oral arguments.
With the success in recent years of such consistently smart situation comedies as ABC’s “Modern Family” and “The Middle,” CBS’ “The Big Bang Theory” and NBC’s “The Office” and “Community,” I started to think that broadcast sitcoms might finally be getting beyond the frat humor and all-around crudeness that seeped into the genre in the ‘90s and all but overtook it during the last decade.
But the early weeks of the 2011-12 television season have me thinking otherwise. Naughtiness is everywhere, especially in the form of talk about naughty bits. It’s particularly potent in some of the season’s best new sitcoms. I’m all for more grown-up entertainment, especially in a medium that no longer cares if kids are watching, but to call what’s happening this fall an uptick is to understate the obvious.
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