Industry programming followed the ratings. Radio performers like Don Imus and Howard Stern found that audiences would tune in to hear profane behavior and would return daily to see just how far the performers would go. By the early 1980s, a new radio format based on shocking public sensibilities, the “shock jock,” had emerged. Yet for audiences yearning for counterculture programming that seemed more real, focusing attention on profanity by bleeping it created a feedback loop that made cursing – and the rebels who did it – more appealing to audiences, piquing their interest about what the bleep concealed.Īt the same time, networks pushing for deregulation wanted to show that they could self-censor and that FCC oversight wasn’t necessary.
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broadcasting that it inspired George Carlin to satirize the practice in his Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on TV monologue.Īfter the FCC came down on Pacifica Radio for broadcasting the bit, Pacifica sued the FCC and the case made it to the Supreme Court, which, in its decision, granted the FCC limited power to protect the public from profanity, especially during the daytime when kids might be listening.Īfterward, bleeping became more commonplace on radio and television. Bleeping out profanity became so common in U.S.
Nonetheless, most broadcasters tended to err on the side of caution.
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Yet by 1970, bleeping out words on TV news was viewed as a potential problem, with some regulators wondering if it unnecessarily tempered the way people actually behaved.įCC chairman Dean Burch, for example, thought the commission should reconsider its use: “If a man stands up and calls me a dirty son of a bitch, I wonder whether we are giving the viewer the full flavor of the news if we quote him as saying, ‘ You’re a dirty bleep, bleep, bleep.’” By the mid-1960s, the bleep tone was heard everywhere, so much so that bleeping was used in FCC deliberations as a verb to define the practice of masking profanity.
Just exactly who deployed the bleep tone first is unclear, but engineers had long used the 1000 hertz sine wave tone to test equipment connections, so it was at their fingertips.
Further innovations, like the seven-second delay, aided the policing of live talk shows, allowing engineers to cover dirty words before they reached the audience’s ears. So the radio engineers created a mechanism for masking her words with music from a phonograph when she dared speak her mind – and they ended up needing to use it several times.īy the time the FCC was established in 1934, studio engineers were regularly masking profanity, as the industry was always trying to stay one step ahead of the censors and stay in the good graces of advertisers. Petrova was famous for her outspoken advocacy for feminism and birth control, and station managers worried that she might violate the 1873 Comstock Act, which prohibited the distribution of obscene materials, including information about contraception. Yet using sounds to mask offensive language predates the FCC and dates back to a 1921 radio speech on Newark, New Jersey’s WJZ by vaudeville actress Olga Petrova. While the First Amendment protects political speech, it does not protect profanity, and in 1964 the Supreme Court gave the Federal Communications Commission the authority to police language in broadcasting. The history of broadcasters’ bleeping out profanity reveals a lot about our culture’s ongoing negotiation of a murky concept.
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It’s been framed as a harbinger of “‘anything goes’ reality television” or “ trash TV” and decried for setting a “ new standard for tawdriness” and for providing audiences with the “guilty pleasure” of “ chair-throwing.”īut as a media historian interested in the ways that sound structures our experience of TV shows and films, when I think of “The Jerry Springer Show,” I think of the sounds – the studio audience chanting “Jerry! Jerry!,” the boxing bell ringing when fists start flying, and the sonic dissonance between the heavy metal-tinged theme song and the soothing, paternal tone of its host.īut one of its most iconic sounds was added in post-production: the 1000 hertz censor bleep, which became more prevalent as the behavior on the show grew more profane.Īn episode of the ‘The Jerry Springer Show’ features all the sonic hallmarks of the program – a chanting crowd, the slap of hand to skin and a cascade of bleeps. Helping to normalize outrageousness in culture, it taught content creators that shamelessness is a lucrative industry.
Since Jerry Springer’s death on April 27, 2023, writers have been working through the cultural significance of his eponymous daytime talk show.įor 27 years, Springer’s circus of sensationalism was a remarkably durable and bankable commodity.
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