F*cked by the F*CC: I asked Robert Corn-Revere--the First Amendment attorney who recently got Lenny Bruce pardoned and who litigated against the Communications Decency Act--about the constitutionality of current regulations and new legislation. He replied: "What constitutionality?... The FCC has done its best to prolong the longevity of this doctrine by keeping it out of court."
In compelling testimony before Congress, Corn-Revere pleaded for a long-overdue constitutional review of indecency policy. He complained that the FCC's indecency (and now profanity) standards evade the tests that courts grant for obscenity: The FCC judges a work not as a whole but by just one word; it judges not by the standard of an "average person" but by that of a child; and it short-circuits due process (Stern complains that his company settled $1.71 million in fines in 1995 only because the FCC was using it to hold licenses hostage). Finally, Corn-Revere says, the enforcement is inconsistent. No one knows where the line is.
