The regulatory qualifications that allow for graphic content here are the so-called watershed, the ever-present concept of public service, considerations of context, and channel warnings. The watershed is a regulatory term for 9pm as a content dividing line. Programming aired before 9pm should be suitable for children under 15 to view; programming after 9pm is intended for adult audiences, ushering in swear words, mature situations and images, and violence (with the latter primarily from US imports). The more graphic the content, the later it is supposed air, but what they deem to be more or less graphic here can be surprising to someone used to American standards. For instance, Channel 4’s Comedy Gala special on Thursday shocked me with the following joke aired around 9:30pm (PTC-types, please avert your eyes): “How do you stop a dog from humping your leg? Pick him up and suck his cock.” And this on a charity show raising money for a children’s hospital.

Nearly all of the testicles I’ve seen are also courtesy of Channel 4. The Embarrassing Bodies series intends to show sheepish Brits who are afraid to tell their doctors about their medical conditions that others have it far worse and yet are willing to display their, um, issues on TV, and thus no one should be afraid to talk to a GP. And herein lies a justification for some of this content: public service under the banner of education. The regulatory overseer Ofcom has fielded complaints about Embarrassing Bodies but defends the series, even when it airs uncovered bathing suit areas pre-watershed, stating in one ruling, “[I]n principle, educational programming on medical matters, and in particular a programme which stresses the importance of viewers not needing to feel anxious or embarrassed by any medical conditions, is not unsuitable for children,” and “discussing male genitalia and sexual problems clearly fell within the educational remit of the series.”

Ofcom also has an extensive list of contextual issues which should be taken into account by programmers, including the likely size and composition of the potential audience and the channel on which the material airs (i.e. Channel 4 is allowed to air more boundary-pushing content because of its remitted mission to do exactly that). And Ofcom insists that channels provide proper warning at the start of shows as to what’s coming along. Following ad breaks during E4’s 10pm airing of Embarrassing Teenage Bodies on Friday, the interstitial announcer warned, “Expect full frontal nudity, intimate examinations, discussions of medical health, and scenes of detailed surgery.”

The announcer also muttered after relaying the title at the start – no kidding – “Oh, my eyes.” Such a cheeky quip seems indicative of the hip youth status E4 strives for, and it also indicates how readily this programming could be taken as exploitative and excessively sensationalistic. However, the educational intent does seem at least partly sincere, with the reminders to see one’s doctor coming across as more than just cursory, and rarely does the content come across as sexually titillating. This shows a level of complexity about sexual content that US television (and culture) rarely approaches. (A friend on Twitter reminded me of the 2000 Tom Green MTV special about testicular cancer, which taught an acquaintance of his, who was not allowed to watch Tom Green, how to self-check, whereupon he found a lump and had surgery.)

Where the dog humping joke might fit within a public service remit is rather less clear (though it was in the name of charity, after all). It’s also worth noting that while the British public is apparently ok with that, thousands complained about costumes and dancing from Christina Aguilera and Rihanna during pre-watershed performances for last year’s X-Factor finale on ITV, which Ofcom later declared within the pre-watershed rules but “at the limit of acceptability.” A government-commissioned report on the sexualisation of media content accessible to children, released just last week, highlighted that incident and has Prime Minister David Cameron insisting that he will impose tighter regulations if Ofcom and the television services don’t voluntarily help to make pre-watershed television even more reliably child-friendly.

Ofcom has plenty of complaints to sift through already, with public concerns raised in recent days over the depiction of an assisted suicide on ITV’s Emmerdale (which I watched, and it offered some of the most powerful scenes I’ve ever seen on a soap), a bed scene between gay lovers on EastEnders (which I also saw and thought was quite chaste compared to a similar scene on ABC’s One Life to Live from last year), the use of the c-word on daytime BBC Radio 4 (yes, I’m censoring myself), and Rihanna’s S&M music video. Ofcom can also prepare for more complaints after the airing of an actual assisted suicide in a BBC documentary Monday night. (And related to these TV issues, the British Board of Film Classification banned Human Centipede II last week.)

So while British TV truly is more permissive with content than American TV, concerns are currently circulating about increasing sexualization and lax regulation, particularly in regard to the potential moral impact of television on children. Meanwhile, American television’s own decency regulations are in legal flux right now. (And it’s intriguing to compare the vagueness of the FCC’s rules with the extensive detail in Ofcom’s Broadcast Code, which not only has many rules but even additional guidance notes on those rules.) But I somehow don’t think that greater testicle allowance will be the end result.

Sadly, there are no new pig metaphors in Fox Television Stations, Inc. v. FCC, the July 13 appellate court decision that ruled the FCC’s indecency policy to be unconstitutional, though the Pacifica case looms large in the decision.  The latest in a series of decisions over the Commission’s indecency enforcement, the Fox court argued that the FCC’s indecency policy was “impermissibly vague,” had a dangerous chilling effect on speech, and violated the First Amendment. According to the court, the current policy had produced too much uncertainty as to what was or was not indecent and thus encouraged broadcasters to adopt overly cautious practices of self-censorship to avoid Commission penalties.

Though the court acknowledged it lacked the authority to overturn the Pacifica precedent, it indicated that the “uniquely pervasive” rationale at its center seemed like something of a relic, an anachronism in an era of online video, the expansion of cable television, social networking sites, or of technologies like the v-chip that allow parents to block the very content the indecency rules were designed to shield from children. Though this was not the meat of the court’s decision, it has been the part of the Fox case that has received a good deal of praise and attention. Commentators ranging from the New York Times editorial board to former FCC chair Michael Powell have suggested that Fox reinforces a marketplace approach to media regulation, one that interprets all content restrictions as outdated, unconstitutional, and unnecessary in a world of media plenty. With so many potential pigs in the parlor, to treat broadcasting as uniquely pervasive no longer seemed tenable.

Yet to me this is the wrong takeaway from Fox.  The appellate court did not only gesture to how the majority decision in Pacifica may no longer be salient, but also importantly implied that the view offered in Brennan’s dissent was perhaps right after all.  The crux of the Fox decision hinged on the vagueness of the Commission’s indecency rules, which had lead to contradictory and discriminatory outcomes.  How does it make sense, the court wondered, that the Commission deemed the word “bullshit” patently offensive, but not “dickhead”?  Perhaps more importantly, why were expletives permissible when uttered by the fictional characters in Saving Private Ryan, understood as necessary to the verisimilitude of the film, but not when spoken by actual musicians interviewed for the documentary The Blues?  Such inconsistencies, the court surmised, potentially reflect the biases of the commissioners themselves and “it is not hard to speculate that the FCC was simply more comfortable with the themes in ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ a mainstream movie with a familiar cultural milieu, than it was with ‘The Blues,’ which largely profiled an outsider genre of musical experience.”

The vagueness of the rules, in other words, not only made it very difficult for broadcasters to anticipate when and whether the use of terms like  “douchebag” (my example, not the court’s) would be ruled indecent, but provided latitude for the Commission to privilege its own mores and values in determining what should be permissible in the public sphere. It is a view that echoed Justice Brennan’s dissent in Pacifica, in which he warned that that the majority decision would sanction the “dominant culture’s efforts to force those groups who do not share its mores to conform to its way of thinking, acting, and speaking,” and in which he accused his colleagues of an “ethnocentric myopia,” the Pacifica decision itself an imposition of the justices’ own “fragile sensibilities” on a culturally pluralistic society.

Brennan’s concern was not that the Commission’s and the Court’s indecency policy was imprecise, but that its intent seemed all too transparent, as a way to silence speech that offended their sense of decorum, expose taboos they’d prefer to remain hidden, articulate political and social values they find unpalatable.  Not only were they burning the house to roast the pig, but the distinctions they were to draw between pearls and swine would sanction their own presumptions about aesthetics, ethics, and respectability.

And this I think is Fox’s important referendum on Pacifica and the indecency policy it had sanctioned: not that the media marketplace is now a panacea of free speech, but that broadcasting policy too often can operate as a cudgel to privilege the sensibilities and perspectives of particular sectors of the community over others in the guise of seemingly neutral regulations.  It’s not, in other words, that our contemporary parlors are overrun with pigs, but that to many of us those pigs in the parlor may never have been pigs after all.

1. I doubt that anyone who wanted to read it missed this, as I saw it linked everywhere, but I wouldn’t want even one person to miss out, so I’ll include it here anyway: a highly affecting profile of film critic Roger Ebert in Esquire. Plus, some of you might have missed Ebert’s response, as well another journalist’s praise for the quality work from Esquire‘s reporter. The Independent also has a fascinating story about Ebert getting his real voice back (sort of), which you can hear Tuesday on Oprah. Finally, if you’re not following Ebert on Twitter, you’re really missing out.

2. The latest social networking platform to freak us out is Chatroulette, invented by a 17-year-old Russian. If you haven’t tried it out yet, first check out this video explanation by Casey Neistat (note: some NSFW language, but no naughty images). Many have tried it out, including The Office writer Mindy Kaling, who tweeted, “Chat Roulette is horrifying. We just used it in our writers room. It was naked guys or guys in Jigsaw masks.” Also, you might unexpectedly come across Ashton. But not everybody is freaked out by it, and some even say if you hate it, you hate the internet. Of course, as a perceptive Slate article notes, we’re always afraid of new media technologies, and besides, without Chatroulette we’d never have gotten this awesome tumblr site: Cat Roulette. Bonus article: a history of social networking.

3. YouTube just celebrated its fifth birthday, and while its co-founder says that from the start they envisioned the site as the people’s voice, NewTeeVee calls BS on that and claims that wasn’t a factor until the people themselves pushed the site that way. One result of such a push: a prestigious George Polk Award for the video of the murder of Iranian demonstrator Neda Agha-Soltan. The NYT’s Brian Stelter has background info on the video, including an interview with the anonymous uploader. But the WSJ’s Evgeny Morozov reminds us that we can’t idealize the power of the internet and social media, and the band OK Go’s frustrating experience is a reminder of who’s most often really in control online. Something very much worth reading in that regard: a simple guide to Net Neutrality.

4. The Oscars are coming up next Sunday. To bolster your Oscar ballot cred, you can read some reviews from people who have actually seen the documentary shorts and the animated and live-action shorts. Also, when the ads come on during the awards broadcast and you have to actually talk to your fellow Oscar partygoers, you can use one of these handy conversation starters: hey, didja see that list of the 50 most deserving Oscar winners of all time; the story about Oscar’s anti-comedy bias; the “preview” of James Cameron’s Oscar speech; what the Academy does with Oscar night revenue; that rude email from the Hurt Locker co-producer and the outcry about it, which is only one part of the backlash against Hurt Locker that’s suddenly cropped up, though it probably won’t hurt its chances anyway; and that Variety apparently takes bribes? If you can’t make a friend with one of those, then there are no friends at that party to be had.

5. Studio news: MGM is dead broke but carries on for now. Warner Bros. is dominant. Disney’s not about the stars anymore, it’s about either the toys or the cheap but also the boys. The Wrap summarizes Hollywood’s for sale signs, while Vanity Fair gives us Hollywood’s top earners.

6.  The kiosk DVD distributor Redbook came to an agreement with Warner Bros. on a 28-day delay window for new releases, and some analysts see dark days ahead for Redbox, while studios are in a tough spot too. Mashable says it’s consumers who will lose. Winners? TechCrunch says piracy. And video rental stores like Blockbuster could benefit, if they live long enough. In a related issue, Disney wants to shorten the Alice in Wonderland DVD release window, which the Guardian sees as nothing less than a future-of-cinema issue. But rather than go read all that, you could instead just watch the very first version of Alice in Wonderland (1903) that the BFI has posted online.

7. The Wrap says the video game industry desperately needs innovation, including the possibility for “video games controlled solely by the mind.” Two other video game stories that caught my eye: the LA Times breaks down where the $60 you  spend for video games goes, and Gamasutra writes about the art of creating video game characters.

8. Some women and the media questions: Can social media bring opportunities for women? Where did all the angry rock grrrls go? And a preview excerpt from Susan Douglas’s new book: where does girl power stand today?

9. Avatar has put “virtual actors” on everyone’s mind: Forbes (with a whole series of features), the LA Times, and film scholar Kristin Thompson chime in. But how about making the animated (Buzz Lightyear) look human?

10. Finally, some of my favorite News for TV Majors links to links from the previous fortnight: pilot previews, the BBC overhaul, the ABC News overhaul, indecency complaints tallied, the lure of reality TV stardom in India, problems at Lifetime, Alec Baldwin = Jack Donaghy, interview with John Wells, and the future of serials.