![]() So the radio engineers created a mechanism for masking her words with music from a phonograph when she dared speak her mind – and they ended up needing to use it several times.īy the time the FCC was established in 1927, studio engineers were regularly masking profanity, as the industry was always trying to stay one step ahead of the censors and stay in the good graces of advertisers. ![]() Petrova was famous for her outspoken advocacy for feminism and birth control, and station managers worried that she might violate the 1873 Comstock Act, which prohibited the distribution of obscene materials, including information about contraception. Yet using sounds to mask offensive language predates the FCC and dates back to a 1921 radio speech on Newark, New Jersey’s WJZ by vaudeville actress Olga Petrova. While the First Amendment protects political speech, it does not protect profanity, and in 1964 the Supreme Court gave the Federal Communications Commission the authority to police language in broadcasting. The history of broadcasters’ bleeping out profanity reveals a lot about our culture’s ongoing negotiation of a murky concept. It’s been framed as a harbinger of “‘anything goes’ reality television” or “ trash TV” and decried for setting a “ new standard for tawdriness” and for providing audiences with the “guilty pleasure” of “ chair-throwing.”īut as a media historian interested in the ways that sound structures our experience of TV shows and films, when I think of “The Jerry Springer Show,” I think of the sounds – the studio audience chanting “Jerry! Jerry!,” the boxing bell ringing when fists start flying, and the sonic dissonance between the heavy metal-tinged theme song and the soothing, paternal tone of its host.īut one of its most iconic sounds was added in post-production: the 1000 hertz censor bleep, which became more prevalent as the behavior on the show grew more profane. Helping to normalize outrageousness in culture, it taught content creators that shamelessness is a lucrative industry. For 27 years, Springer’s circus of sensationalism was a remarkably durable and bankable commodity. ![]()
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