First Contact Censorship?

[bigdaddy]

I love the fact that about 10 years ago I was listening to the radio, a radio is that thing that plays music between the ads, the station beeped out "high" from "getting high" and "bitch" from a Pink song. The same station played the song "Bitch" numerous times, no issues at all!

Never try to figure out stupid censorship.

 

[CorporalClegg]

I love the fact that about 10 years ago I was listening to the radio, a radio is that thing that plays music between the ads, the station beeped out "high" from "getting high" and "bitch" from a Pink song. The same station played the song "Bitch" numerous times, no issues at all!

Never try to figure out stupid censorship.

Contradictions in song censorship are actually quite common. The reason is because the stations don't do the censoring themselves. They get copies of songs/albums from the studios. Some studios censor and others don't.

This is even more true now that stations are switching to digital media for their music.

 

[The Mirrorball Man]

Not sure what point you are trying to make? I am sure you are aware that the USA has a constitution that makes such a provision, but it cannot force a private TV company to broadcast material they don't want to, and nor should it.

Yeah, sorry, I don't want to derail the thread. Just wanted to point quickly out that the US constitution doesn't actually guarantee freedom of speech, it just prevent the government from putting limits to it. In a world where corporations are the gatekeepers to the media, that provision is meaningless and private ownership effectively trumps the first amendment. In such a system, where actual freedom of speech is not guaranteed, corporate censorship can and does happen and there is nothing one can do to prevent that from happening.

Of course, I realize that this may not be the right place to talk about that kind of thing, so feel free to ignore what I've just said.

 

[Nerys Myk]

I love the fact that about 10 years ago I was listening to the radio, a radio is that thing that plays music between the ads, the station beeped out "high" from "getting high" and "bitch" from a Pink song. The same station played the song "Bitch" numerous times, no issues at all!

Never try to figure out stupid censorship.

There's a song by Nickleback that has the lyric "We got weeds in the backyard 4 feet tall Cheech and Chong prob'ly woulda' smoked 'em all" And the station my wife listens to always beeps out "smoked". They leave in the references to hitting the bong and drinking beer, but beep "smoked"??????

 

[trevanian]

I don't think it is EVER possible to figure out what will get censored at any given time.
Back in 1983, my folks won a surprise trip to Ireland on a short-lived daytime network show (I think it was called FANTASIES or something like that.) When the late Meredith Mcrae (still insanely hot nearly 15 years after PETTICOAT JUNCTION, I can honestly add) got my mom to open the front door and told her the news, my mom just kept shouting
OH MY GOD OH MY GOD.

Yet when the show aired (and we still have a wobbly VHS of this), the GOD parts of her speech were simply muted, it was all OH MY ____dead space____ (and REPEAT)

I mean who wouldn't be yelling something like that? Was it going to corrupt some young agnostic's mind? I've never had any belief in deities, but shit, I wasn't offended (sorry, guess that should read _____, I wasn't offended.)

 

[BriGuy]

It's still there on both the Blu-ray and DVD versions of the film. I don't waste time with SyFy.

Yeah, who is gonna watch a movie on commercial TV anyway? Edited for time, edited for content, "reformatted to fit this screen," and cut up with commercials.

I especially love seeing a two hour or so movie that takes three hours to watch. (or some variation thereof)

 

[R. Star]

I just had it going in the background, just happened to be looking that way during that particular scene. The funny thing is they still showed him mouthing it quite clearly.

Sure it's their channel and they can show what they want. Just it's silly at best and more toward the lines of petty to censor that of all things out.

 

[BillJ]

I just had it going in the background, just happened to be looking that way during that particular scene. The funny thing is they still showed him mouthing it quite clearly.

Sure it's their channel and they can show what they want. Just it's silly at best and more toward the lines of petty to censor that of all things out.

But it was likely done to satisfy the religious crowd, not the PC crowd.

 

[MacLeod]

Somes the time of day something airs can have an impact on whether or not something is censored.

 

[iguana_tonante]

Sure it's their channel and they can show what they want. Just it's silly at best and more toward the lines of petty to censor that of all things out.

But it was likely done to satisfy the religious crowd, not the PC crowd.

Good luck in having R.Star admit that.

 

[Lance]

It is interesting that things which were once considered perfectly fine for television -- I assume most if not all of this very mild cursing made it through fine on original tv broadcasts? -- is now very 'touch and go'. Does that say something about today's society? Is there maybe a more puritan streak in modern popular culture than there was ten, twenty, thirty years ago? It seems ironic to me, because some of the stuff I see in things like modern music videos would have been completely unbroadcastable back in the day.

 

[Maurice]

It was only a couple of years ago that I noticed "faggot" was bleeped out of 'Money for Nothing'...even though Dire Straits are being completly ironic.

Replace that f word with the n word and see how "ironic" it is. To a lot of people that f word is just as offensive. It was a poor choice on Dire Straits part to use it in the first place.

 

[trevanian]

It was only a couple of years ago that I noticed "faggot" was bleeped out of 'Money for Nothing'...even though Dire Straits are being completly ironic.

Replace that f word with the n word and see how "ironic" it is. To a lot of people that f word is just as offensive. It was a poor choice on Dire Straits part to use it in the first place.

I'm terrible at hearing/comprehending lyrics, but I always assumed that f word was them using it as the british slang for cigarette, not a slur at homosexuals.

Of course, I'm also the guy who for decades thought Billy Idol was singing 'howzabout a date?' when it was 'eyes without a face.'

EYES WITHOUT A FACE! That sounds like a heavy metal song, but the Idol piece is almost ballad like.

 

[Nerys Myk]

It was only a couple of years ago that I noticed "faggot" was bleeped out of 'Money for Nothing'...even though Dire Straits are being completly ironic.

Replace that f word with the n word and see how "ironic" it is. To a lot of people that f word is just as offensive. It was a poor choice on Dire Straits part to use it in the first place.

I'm terrible at hearing/comprehending lyrics, but I always assumed that f word was them using it as the british slang for cigarette, not a slur at homosexuals.

Of course, I'm also the guy who for decades thought Billy Idol was singing 'howzabout a date?' when it was 'eyes without a face.'

EYES WITHOUT A FACE! That sounds like a heavy metal song, but the Idol piece is almost ballad like.

The context says otherwise. The character in the song is whining about how easy the life a musician must be compared to a real job.

I remember first hearing the song "Lips Like Sugar" by Echo and the Bunnymen thinking they were singing "lips like chickens".

 

[Christopher]

It is interesting that things which were once considered perfectly fine for television -- I assume most if not all of this very mild cursing made it through fine on original tv broadcasts? -- is now very 'touch and go'. Does that say something about today's society? Is there maybe a more puritan streak in modern popular culture than there was ten, twenty, thirty years ago?

Huh? What are you talking about? It's the other way around. I was just mentioning above how in the '60s you couldn't even use "damn" as a profanity on TV. Today you hear tons of curse words that would never have been allowed on commercial TV in the '60s or '70s. I've just recently been watching reruns of The Rockford Files, and they always have characters break off after saying "son of a--." You couldn't say "bitch" on TV back then. But last night on Castle, I heard it used four times in about ten seconds. Heck, on basic cable channels like USA and Syfy, shows aired at 10 PM are even free to use the S-word (last night I heard it a couple of times on Lost Girl, though it was bleeped on Continuum two hours earlier), which wouldn't have been the case just a few years ago -- heck, even two years ago. The most recent season of Covert Affairs on USA had characters using the S-word several times per episode, but I don't recall them ever using it at all in the first two seasons.

So TV has gotten progressively less puritan about curse words over the decades. I think that the influence of pay cable, where there are no restrictions on profanity or other content, is further eroding the censorship limits on free cable and broadcast TV, as shows there have to get more adult and edgy to compete. Also there's just the shift in societal attitudes -- words that are taboo or shocking to one generation eventually lose their shock value and become commonplace and harmless to a later generation.

Most of what's been discussed in this thread has been the bleeping of language in feature films shown on TV or in popular songs on certain broadcast stations. Those cases where a word originally used in the clear on a TV show was bleeped in a rerun -- like Futurama's "Sweet Zombie Jesus" or the S-word in Continuum -- have been the result of a show made for one market (certain network, certain time slot, certain country) being aired in a different one that had stricter standards. But as with my Continuum/Lost Girl example above, the same network can have different censorship guidelines at different times of day.

 

[Peach Wookiee]

SyFy seems to censor very unnecessarily. In fact, there was an anime that aired on that channel that cut out a rather humorous scene that wasn't cut on AZN TV. I don't know if it was because it dealt with SyFy's fear of showing a minor (16 years old) getting schnookered, but it does seem rather unnecessary.

The same goes for the censoring mentioned by the OP.

 

[Garrovick]

TV these days is downright hedonistic compared to what it was a few decades ago. Most of the stuff on the air these days wouldn't stand a Tribble's chance on Qo'Nos of making it to the air 30 years ago.

 

[Dale Sams]

It was only a couple of years ago that I noticed "faggot" was bleeped out of 'Money for Nothing'...even though Dire Straits are being completly ironic.

Replace that f word with the n word and see how "ironic" it is. To a lot of people that f word is just as offensive. It was a poor choice on Dire Straits part to use it in the first place.

The character in the song is a real person overheard by the song writer one day....are song writers not allowed take on the character of an ignoramus now?

 

[JarodRussell]

I had a conversation with some German friends, and they hate to be called the "N word", too, as it is incredibly offensive. Should it be censored because of that?

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I had a conversation with some German friends, and they hate to be called the "N word", too, as it is incredibly offensive. Should it be censored because of that?

Could we all maybe talk about the same kind of censorship here?

It's not a government censoring any of this stuff, but private companies. So, what they censor is entirely up to them.