FCC Hands Out First Fine For Nudity In 7 Years

It's been well over 11 years since middle America flipped the fuck out over Janet Jackson's tit being exposed to the masses, and in that time, the number of fines for nudity on television have declined. They've declined so much, in fact, that the first fine in 7 years was just handed out to a TV station in Virginia.

According to the National Journal (link below), a salacious picture was shown on screen for all of three seconds, causing an epic freakout.

A Roanoke, Virginia, station accidentally aired a brief pornographic video clip during its evening newscast on July 12, 2012, in a segment on an ex-porn star who was volunteering for a local rescue squad. The station included a 3-second clip from the woman's website of her posing suggestively, but the station says it didn't notice that the site had an explicit video clip in a box on the side of the webpage.

The proposed $325,000 fine of WDBJ Television is the maximum amount possible under the law.

Now, before you get excited and start thinking that the dearth of fines in the last seven years is due to people calming the fuck down, it actually has more to do with a bunch of legal mumbo jumbo. 

The FCC has long barred radio and broadcast TV stations from airing indecent material such as curse words and nudity. But for much of the Obama administration, the agency declined to enforce the rules, saying its authority was in legal limbo because of constitutional challenges from broadcasters.

In 2012, the Supreme Court upheld the FCC's authority to police the airwaves for indecent content. The FCC settled cases against two radio stations in 2014, but Monday's ruling is the first action against a TV station since 2008.

Sleep well worrywarts, the FCC is still on the case. Thank goodness, otherwise no one will think of the children.

Via National Journal