Profanity has won, and we shouldn’t have a bureaucracy to police it.
Profanity has won, and we shouldn’t have a bureaucracy to police it.
L ast week, Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss had a good Saturday. After beating LSU, he was so excited that he forgot to take his mouthpiece out for much of his postgame TV interview. Then, as the interview ended, he gave ESPN’s Holly Rowe the school’s famous “Hotty Toddy” cheer with a new word wedged into the middle. The word, as every iPhone autocorrect user knows, rhymes with “ducking.”
The next day came the apology. Chambliss said his emotions ran high after the game, he got caught up in the moment, and he apologized to Rowe and everyone who had been listening. The country accepted it and moved on. He has since become the Heisman favorite, and nobody’s children appear to have been harmed.
In fact, televised sports has long featured both positive and negative “bursts,” from joyous streams of profanity after touchdowns to analyst Tom Brady’s “oh sh**” after seeing Washington Commanders quarterback Jayden Daniels’s elbow bend in a way nature had not intended.
But that game aired on ABC, a broadcast network, and that means a federal agency technically has authority over a twentysomething’s burst of joy.
And yet the bureaucracy charged with mandating decency over the nation’s airwaves has had nothing to say. So why does the federal government still police language on television at all?
The FCC started largely as traffic control. In the 1920s, radio stations crowded onto one another’s frequencies, and Congress passed the Radio Act of 1927 to sort out the mess. The Communications Act of 1934 replaced the old Federal Radio Commission with the FCC and continued the government’s power to license broadcasters according to the “public interest, convenience, or necessity.”
But frequency allocation eventually brought content regulation with it. Because the broadcast spectrum was considered scarce, the Supreme Court allowed the government considerably more latitude to regulate broadcasters than to regulate newspapers or other speakers. And when it came to indecent programming, the argument went further: Unlike a book or newspaper, a broadcast could enter the home uninvited and be heard by children.
The Supreme Court endorsed that reasoning in 1978’s FCC v. Pacifica, which upheld an FCC finding that a New York radio station’s afternoon broadcast of George Carlin’s “Filthy Words” routine was indecent. The justices described broadcasting as “uniquely pervasive” and “uniquely accessible to children.”
That may have been true in 1978, when a family’s options were three networks and a UHF station airing roller derby. It is not true now. Broadcast television accounted for just 21.7 percent of all TV viewing in February 2026, and that was in a month when the Super Bowl and the Olympics inflated its numbers. The largest single media company on America’s screens isn’t a network at all. In January 2026, YouTube held the top spot in Nielsen’s distributor rankings for the eleventh straight month, with a 12.5 percent share. None of that viewing falls under the FCC’s indecency rules, and neither does anything on cable or streaming, because none of it travels over the “public” airwaves.
In other words, the federal speech police are guarding one room in the house while the family watches TV everywhere else. The public has voted, and profanity has won.
It has won most clearly in sports, the programming Washington supposedly protects hardest. Watch any season of HBO’s Hard Knocks, where NFL players whose jerseys hang in children’s closets swear more often than they breathe. Pop music is no different. Sabrina Carpenter’s act would make a VFW bartender blush, and her audience is largely teenage girls. Jimmy Kimmel once posted a video showing that his nine-year-old daughter listens to Olivia Rodrigo’s album Guts on the way to school each morning. That album opens with a song whose title can’t be printed in a family newspaper, and its first three songs may have been deemed too profane by a 1990s gangster rap group. (Kimmel, of course, hosts a show on ABC, where his own guests get bleeped for using the same words his kids hear on the drive to school.)
None of this means parents shouldn’t want wholesome entertainment for their kids. It means they can already find it without federal help. Parents don’t have to worry about their kids hearing “Go f*** yourself, Bluey,” and no bureaucrat has to stand guard to keep it that way, because a huge market of parents wants shows like that beloved cartoon. Defenders of PBS insist that educational programming would disappear without taxpayer support, yet children’s programming thrives on dozens of commercial platforms. Clean content works the same way.
For years, CBS was the most-watched network in America largely because it offered procedurals that grandparents and grandkids could watch together (Touched by an Angel, etc.). That was a business decision, not a regulatory requirement. Families that want clean programming would still find it, and networks would keep selling it to them.
Further, the FCC has a terrible record of enforcing fines on broadcast networks. The agency once fined local ABC affiliates over $1.2 million total for airing an episode of NYPD Blue that featured a nude female derrière; the Second District Court of Appeals vacated the fine, noting that “nudity itself is not per se indecent.” Ditto for the famous “wardrobe malfunction” incident during the halftime show of the 2004 Super Bowl, for which the FCC fined CBS.
There is also a bigger reason to rethink the FCC, and it has nothing to do with four-letter words and exposed rumps. The power to decide what is “decent” is also the power to decide what is allowed, and that power is now being used. This year, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr threatened to revoke the licenses of broadcast stations that aired news critical of the Trump administration’s handling of the Iran war. When displeased by Kimmel’s comment about the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk shortly after it occurred, Carr also warned ABC that its affiliates’ license renewals could go “the easy way, or the hard way.”
That is not new. As the Cato Institute’s Paul Matzko has documented, the vague public interest standard has been used to push a wide range of Americans off the airwaves, including immigrants, pacifists, African Americans, conservatives, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and socialists. An agency created to keep radio stations from talking over one another has spent nearly a century deciding who is allowed to talk.
Matzko’s solution is simple: sell off the broadcast spectrum. If stations owned their own frequencies, no FCC chair could use license renewals as a back door for censorship. Broadcasters would then have the same First Amendment protection that cable channels, streamers, podcasters, and every YouTuber with a ring light already have.
Publications such as the one you are currently reading have the right to choose the words they want to print — and to edit words considered offensive (see examples above). Cable news networks are not subject to FCC jurisdiction, and yet the public market for news mostly prevents them from devolving into the Def Comedy Jam.
Sorry to the traditionalists, but profanity has won, and the FCC is simply a government-funded relic of days past. There is simply no more justification for censoring content on the public airwaves, especially when that agency has shown that it was itching to regulate a late-night talk show. A free society doesn’t need an entity in Washington to decide whether a college quarterback’s excitement deserves a fine.