It’s somewhat ironic that the guy who took over the morning timeslot on MSNBC from Don Imus after his own ill-advised comments used his own fleeting expletive on live national television this morning:
That was your out-loud voice, Joe.
Joe Scarborough awoke MSNBC viewers Monday with a four-letter expletive that he hardly realized he had uttered until his co-hosts and guests reacted.
Mr. Scarborough, the host of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, said he was recounting an earlier conversation with Jay Carney, the Washington bureau chief for Time magazine, about the incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s temperament. Drawing a contrast with Mr. Emanuel, Mr. Scarborough said Barack Obama’s aides are “good, decent, steady men that don’t go around flipping people off or screaming” the aforementioned obscenity “at the top of their lungs.”
While the co-host Mika Brzezinski, Mr. Carney and other guests noticed the TV red flag immediately, it took half a minute for Mr. Scarborough to acknowledge he may have cursed on the air. “Did I say the word?” he asked, looking genuinely surprised. “You meant to say the letter,” Ms. Brzezinski told him.
“Great apologies if I said the word instead of the letter. My wife is going to kill me when I get home,” he said.
His wife, Susan, had one question for him via e-mail: “How big’s the fine?”
Ironically, the Supreme Court heard arguments on that very issue only last week:
WASHINGTON — If the Supreme Court does not act, the solicitor general of the United States somberly told its justices on Tuesday, the children of America may be in for some rude surprises.
“The world that the networks are asking you to adopt here today, where the networks are free to use expletives,” said Gregory G. Garre, the solicitor general, may include “the extreme example of Big Bird dropping the F-bomb on ‘Sesame Street.’ ”
In a lively argument heavy on euphemism and concern for the state of the culture, the Supreme Court considered the role of the Federal Communications Commission in regulating “fleeting expletives” on broadcast television — essentially, whether the government can penalize a network for letting a dirty word slip onto the air.
The narrow question before the court was whether the commission had given a sound reason for changing its approach to the treatment of isolated, as opposed to repeated, swearing.
For many years, the commission had looked the other way in cases involving the broadcast of a single, generally live and impromptu four-letter word. But in orders in 2004 and 2006 concerning unscripted swearing by Bono, Cher and Nicole Richie on awards shows, the commission said fleeting expletives might be punished after all.
At Tuesday’s argument, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. appeared to agree with the commission’s contention that all uses of certain four-letter words run afoul of a regulation prohibiting material that “depicts or describes sexual or excretory activities or organs.”
“Why do you think the F-word has shocking value or emphasis or force?” Chief Justice Roberts asked Carter G. Phillips, a lawyer for Fox Television Stations, which had broadcast some of the offending language.
The chief justice answered his own question: “Because it is associated with sexual or excretory activity. That’s what gives it its force.”
Justice Antonin Scalia added that this was the reason people “don’t use ‘gollywaddles’ instead of the F-word.”
It was not clear Tuesday whether the justices would limit themselves to assessing the reasonableness of the commission’s actions or reach the larger question of whether government regulation of indecent speech on the airwaves can be justified under the First Amendment in the Internet era.
Here’s the video, which is amusing to watch simply because Scarborough goes on for nearly a minute not realizing what he’d said while Mike Barnacle, Chuck Todd, and Mika Brezinski just watch:
Heh.
