Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [80]
In the case of Carlin’s “Filthy Words” and WBAI, the FCC commissioners maintained that they were most concerned with the timing of the broadcast, in the middle of the day, when minors might conceivably have been listening. Loath to be accused of the dreaded C word—censorship—the agency delicately characterized its action as “channeling behavior, rather than actually prohibiting it.” In lieu of a fine, the commission added its report to the station’s license file, which amounted to fair warning. WBAI “could have been the subject of administrative sanctions,” the commissioners noted in their declaratory ruling of February 21, 1975. Whether or not Carlin’s work was intentionally “prurient” or could be shown to have redeeming social value was immaterial, the agency claimed: “Obnoxious, gutter language . . . has the effect of debasing and brutalizing human beings by reducing them to their mere bodily functions, and we believe that such words are indecent within the meaning of the statute and have no place on radio when children are in the audience.”
Commissioner Glen Robinson acknowledged that he probably would have concluded differently had the monologue been broadcast at night. Despite the soft-pedaling, he could not resist making a withering value judgment: Pacifica’s comparison of Carlin with Twain “strikes me personally as being a bit jejune,” he wrote. “But no one should suppose that an author must be a giant of letters in order to receive protection for works which have ‘serious literary or artistic . . . value.’ The Constitution protects lesser literary lights as well as those with the artistic candlepower of Mark Twain.”
The FCC’s rebuke of WBAI in the Carlin case was hardly an isolated incident. The commission had been eyeing Pacifica for years, going back to the 1950s and KPFA’s broadcast of a panel discussion about the Howl obscenity case and its impending trial. In March 1957, San Francisco police had arrested bookseller and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti for selling Allen Ginsberg’s allegedly obscene poem at City Lights bookstore in North Beach. For that program, moderated by Pacifica founder Lewis Hill, the station ran a voluntarily expurgated version of Ginsberg’s epic poem “simply as a matter of taste,” given the early timing of the broadcast. It got the FCC’s attention nevertheless.
Well into the 1960s, the commission heard routine complaints about KPFA and its sister stations for controversial or inflammatory content—for a presentation of Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, for instance. The scrutiny increased as the stations stepped up their critical coverage of the Vietnam War. War protest being an unequivocal example of protected speech, the FCC acted instead on complaints of “indecency.”
In defense, the network became a pro bono client of the Washington, D.C., law firm Arent Fox Kintner Plotkin & Kahn. Arent Fox, originally a tax-law office, had expanded to include several diversified practices, entering the field of communications law with the addition of attorney Harry M. Plotkin, who had previously been assistant general counsel to the FCC. Plotkin, a seasoned trial lawyer who would argue several cases with First Amendment implications before the Supreme Court, headed a team that had been representing Pacifica’s stations for years by the time of the “Filthy Words” broadcast.
Thomas Schattenfield, a member of the communications practice who took the lead on Pacifica, says he always felt there were professional moralists keeping tabs on Pacifica’s stations. The radical radio group welcomed the challenges, he says: “They were a bunch of bright young people trying to prove themselves to the world.” Representing Pacifica in a hearing for new licenses for stations in Houston and Washington, D.C., Schattenfield had