No Fine For ‘Wardrobe Malfunction’
.Four years later, an appeals court has thrown out the FCC’s ridiculous fine for Janet Jackson’s infamous Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction”.
The main reason for the decision, apparently, is that the FCC doesn’t get to arbitrarily change its policies on the fly without warning, and that channels had to have some prior notice:
[The FCC] cannot change a well-established course of action without supplying notice of and a reasoned explanation for its policy departure.
—UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE THIRD CIRCUIT No. 06-3575, CBS et al. v. FCC, p14
and
The Commission’s determination that CBS’s broadcast of a nine-sixteenths of one second glimpse of a bare female breast was actionably indecent evidenced the agency’s departure from its prior policy. Its orders constituted the announcement of a policy change&8212;that fleeting images would no longer be excluded from the scope of actionable indecency.
—UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE THIRD CIRCUIT No. 06-3575, CBS et al. v. FCC, p30
The whole thing was always a ridiculous faux-controversy over virtually nothing, of course, and it irks me that the court agrees with the idea that Janet Jackson’s breast was “bare” in that fleeting moment, when in fact her nipple was covered. It’s already insane that people would get so upset about nine-sixteenths of a second’s worth of bare breast (the horror!), but to get so upset when Jackson’s breast was not bare but had ‘a silver sunburst “shield” covering her nipple’—that’s truly crazy.
There are certainly reasons to object to broadcasters using human flesh to peddle various things, but to have the country freak out over OMG-it-might-have-been-naked-but-it-was-gone-too-fast-to-really-see, that’s just really embarrassing.
Given that the FCC were (and presumably are) trying very hard to pander to right-wing nutjobs, I don’t think this will alter their attitude, but it’s nice to see they’re not getting away with it in this instance.