Eight years after the half-second exposure, the Janet Jackson case is over – but the indecency debate lives on.
The Janet Jackson case is, for all intents and purposes, finished.
With a one-sentence order stuck toward the end (at page 13, to be precise) of a routine 15-page listing of mundane orders, the Supreme Court has stuck a fork in the long-running indecency case. Specifically, the Supremes have declined the FCC’s invitation to review the most recent decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which had twice found fatal flaws in the FCC’s treatment of the Jackson case.
But, as has been customary with just about everything surrounding L’Affaire Jackson, even the Supreme Court’s final order included some unexpected flair.
When the Supremes decline to review a case (which they do in the vast majority of cases that get filed with the high court), the action is normally reflected in a simple nine-word order – “The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.” That means that at least six of the justices saw no reason to hear the appeal. The final order in the Jackson case followed that course.
But in the Jackson case, Chief Justice Roberts bothered to write a two-page concurring opinion questioning whether the Third Circuit had really gotten it right. The Third Circuit’s decision was based on the notion that the half-second exposure of Ms. Jackson’s right breast was essentially the same as a “fleeting expletive”. As to that analogy, Roberts says “I am not so sure.” As he sees it, images are different from words. To hammer that point home, he quotes the prosaic proverb, “a picture is worth a thousand words”.
But, given the Court’s decision in FCC v. Fox, Roberts acknowledges that the distinction is in any event immaterial: “[i]t is now clear that the brevity of an indecent broadcast – be it word or image – cannot immunize it from FCC censure.”
This underscores the narrowness of the Fox decision and the continuing vitality of indecency regulation, at least in the Chief Justice’s mind. While the bottom line in Fox was that Fox and ABC got off the hook, that happy result was based on the technicality that the broadcasts in question had occurred before the Commission had announced, in 2004, that fleeting expletives (and, by extension, fleeting images) were taboo. The Court’s opinion left wide open the question of whether the FCC could, consistently with the First Amendment, penalize such broadcasts occurring after the 2004 announcement. It also left open the question of whether the FCC could penalize other instances of non-fleeting language (or images), regardless of whether they were aired before or after the 2004 announcement.
Roberts’s separate opinion clearly suggests that he, for one, believes that the FCC’s indecency policies can, should and do live on post-Fox.
On the other hand, adding still more flair to the Court’s denial of review in the Jackson case, Justice Ginsburg also weighs in with a concurring opinion. It consists of one sentence, which we reproduce here in toto:
The Court’s remand in FCC v. Fox Television Stations, Inc., 567 U. S. ___ (2012), affords the Commission an opportunity to reconsider its indecency policy in light of technological advances and the Commission’s uncertain course since this Court’s ruling in FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U. S. 726 (1978).
That, of course, echoes her concurring opinion in Fox in which she announced her strong belief that the Court’s first and only (thus far) endorsement of indecency regulation (in Pacifica) was “wrong”. (Memo to Justice Ginsburg: Could you try not to sugarcoat it next time?)
So there you have it: a court that is still split on whether the government can constitutionally regulate broadcast indecency. We’ve had to live in the shadow of that uncertainty since the 1978 Pacifica decision. It looks like we’ll be living with for some time to come.
