Happy Tuesday! Today’s top was reported with an assist from our ace business of entertainment reporter Steven Zeitchik.
The real reason Will Smith’s Oscars outburst was censored on U.S. broadcasts
Will Smith approaches and slaps Chris Rock onstage during the 94th Oscars at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood on March 27. (Robyn Beck/AFP)
After movie star Will Smith slapped comedian Chris Rock onstage during the Oscars late Sunday, people rushed to social media to see their confrontation in full.
That’s because immediately after the slap aired on U.S. broadcasts, sound was briefly cut off as Smith and Rock continued to trade words — marking one of the most high-profile instances of a broadcast being censored in recent U.S. history.
The decision to censor the altercation highlights the fiercely contested U.S. standards around indecent and profane material, which constantly loom over broadcasters when they decide whether to carry controversial segments, like this.
Social media users on Sunday quickly surfaced uncensored footage of the broadcast that appeared to run in full in other countries, including Australia and Japan, but not in the United States.
The clips show that after Smith slapped Rock for making a joke about Smith’s wife Jada Pinkett Smith, Rock quipped, “Wow. Will Smith just smacked the s— out of me.” After Smith sat back down in the audience, he shouted repeatedly at Rock, “Keep my wife’s name out your f—ing mouth.”
If U.S. broadcasters had carried the profanity-laced exchange, they could have run afoul of federal rules prohibiting “obscene, indecent and profane content from being broadcast on the radio or TV,” media law experts told The Technology 202.
Regulators ban the broadcasting of “obscene” material, which is treated more severely, 24 hours a day. But they only restrict broadcasters from airing “indecent” or “profane” material between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., “when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience,” according to the Federal Communications Commission.
While the exchange ran after 10 p.m. on the East Coast, it ran before the cutoff on the West Coast, which could have opened broadcasters up to liability.
The definitions of those terms have been subject to intense debate for decades and has spawned legal battles that have risen all the way up to the Supreme Court.
While the FCC has rarely punished broadcasters for violating the rules in recent years, American University law professor Victoria Phillips said the mere threat of a fine in the hundreds of thousands has led companies to police themselves, with the guidelines serving as “a constant bee in their bonnet.”
The FCC did not return a request for comment on whether it has received consumer complaints about the segment, or whether it is reviewing the matter.
An email request to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which produces the Oscars, was not returned. ABC, the Academy’s long-term U.S. broadcasting partner, which has a strong say in production, declined to comment.
ABC creates a raw feed of the event which it sends globally for rights-holders around the world to air in accordance with their own precepts. The network then employs its own standards and practices department to bleep or cut away from moments it finds problematic in the United States, relying on a brief delay to do so, my colleague Steven Zeitchik reports for The Technology 202.
If run in full, the altercation may have tested a controversial FCC policy against what are known as “fleeting expletives” — vulgar words flung in an unscripted manner, including at live events like the Oscars.
In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled against the FCC’s “fleeting expletives” policy because it said the agency did not give broadcasters adequate notice of its rule change. But the court notably did not rule on the constitutionality of the policy itself, creating a legal gray area for regulators and broadcasters.
“Broadcasters deal with some ambiguity about whether fleeting expletives, like what Will Smith said, would result in a fine or not,” Duke University professor Philip Napoli said.
But Napoli argued that other factors play a strong role in these decisions, including concerns that airing such material could upset advertisers and consumers.
Phillips said the decision by U.S. broadcasters to censor expletives that ran in some other countries — right after airing the physical altercation between Smith and Rock in full — also speaks to Americans’ sensibilities about profanity and violence.
“Indecency guidelines have all been about sort of sexual, titillating provocative stuff, yet we see so much violence” on broadcast TV and radio, said Phillips, who previously served as an adviser at the FCC.
According to the FCC, profane content is considered “ ‘grossly offensive’ language that is considered a public nuisance,” while indecent content “portrays sexual or excretory organs or activities in a way that is patently offensive” but stops short of legal standards on obscenity.
Tim Winter, president of the Parents Television Media Council, applauded ABC for “doing a superb job at ensuring audiences did not hear profanity in the U.S. broadcast,” but called it “disappointing” that viewers, including younger ones, saw the physical altercation.
U.S. rules on indecent material only apply to things broadcast on TV or radio airwaves — not cable, streaming or social media. That means that while ABC could theoretically face fines for carrying such material, HBO, Netflix or YouTube could not.
“This notion of indecency is literally a category of speech, that from a legal standpoint, only really exists within the realm of broadcasting,” Napoli said.