Remember how the Janet Jackson "Boob Gate" story had the angry Conservative watch dog groups up in arms which as usual filtered down into the MSM? A court threw out the ridiculous fine against CBS.
When Janet Jackson's now infamous "wardrobe malfunction" occurred at the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show in Houston, any viewer who blinked missed the nine-sixteenths of a second exposure of her right breast as fellow performer Justin Timberlake tugged at her costume..
Not so fleeting was the near-hysterical reaction of the Federal Communications Commission, which launched a four-year morality crusade against indecency on the public airwaves and fined CBS $550,000. FCC officials failed to establish that CBS had advance knowledge of the stunt and wrongly concluded that Jackson and Timberlake were employees of the network.
In going after CBS, the FCC abandoned a long-held policy of ignoring brief, unscripted incidents of nudity or vulgarity beyond the control of broadcasters. The commission, then headed by chairman Michael Powell, also went after Fox Broadcasting for incidents in which Cher and Nicole Ritchie uttered expletives during awards shows. Moved by the tempests on a TV screen, Congress jumped into the act by increasing indecency penalties tenfold.
The judges sensibly ruled that Jackson and Timberlake were independent contractors rather than CBS employees, and that the FCC had changed the rules of its indecency enforcement without giving notice to broadcasters...read on
Brent Bozell's nutty PTC is up in arms over this decision. Here's a little info on the PTC
It was discovered in 2004 that Brent Bozell’s group called the PTC filed 99.8% of all complaints to the FCC. Read Jeff Jarvis’: “The shocking truth about the FCC: Censorship by the tyranny of the few.” Jarvis also lists a litany of frivious complaints filed by the PTC.
What a complete waste of time this was, but as usual conservatives like Bozell got to be taken seriously by the press even though he never polices what I would consider conservative pornography. Another embarrassing escapade for the Anna Nicole Smith Press corp.
