Cleaning up content
Daniel L. Jaffe
Comedian George Carlin's famous “seven dirty words” monologue was first released in 1972 on his album Class Clown. A version of that monologue was broadcast the next year by the Pacifica radio station WBAI-FM. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) received complaints and concluded that the broadcast was indecent. In 1978, a Supreme Court decision upholding the FCC ruling formally established indecency regulation in American broadcasting.
Almost three decades later, two of Carlin's seven dirty words were again the focus of FCC rulings on broadcast indecency. And the commission found that the “S-word”...