O'Reilly was kind of funny here.
And yeah, I love how we have no forced censorship here. Some commercial tv outlets self-censor to keep their advertisers, but there's no fucktard organization like the FCC here. Public channels don't sport any censorship. Naked people on the news? No problem. Swearing? No problem, and why would it be? Someone else said it, they're just reporting it. In American news, swear words are almost approached as if they were ancient curses, dooming anyone who dares pronounce them. If you're repeating what someone said, it must be newsworthy, so just say it goddammit.
I don't get censorship. At all. It has to be the most ridiculous thing ever invented. I mean, what's the point of bleeping out a word? If you hear motherf<beep>cker, are you really confused as to what it means? Do you go "Hmm, what could that be? Could it be motherficker, or perhaps motherfacker?". You know what it means, little innocent Timmy knows what it means, so who the fuck are you trying to fool?
People who favor censorship never heard of the word context. If I say "I hope you die, you motherfucker", bleeping out motherfucker won't make it any friendlier. I'm still being rude, you just threw an annoying beep sound into the sentence. Censorship doesn't change anything about the message.
Even worse is stations like MTV blurring or pixelating someone's mouth when they say fuck. There's no bigger insult to your intelligence than watching a show where they blur out someone's mouth because they're saying naughty things. Or a middle finger. Or a butt crack.
It's also so arbitrary. I like to watch House and you'll quickly notice that House is always called a jerk, where he would be referred to as an asshole in real life situations. But that's because somehow, calling someone a jerk is OK, while calling someone an asshole isn't, on TV. If you do it for the kids, then why are you teaching them that calling someone names is OK at all? Be consistent and censor out everything then. Calling someone a son of a bitch is also acceptable, even though I wouldn't be phased by someone calling me that, it's objectively more offensive than being called a rectum, which doesn't even make sense. Also, using the word dick as someone's name is fine, but calling someone a dick isn't. Well, it is, but it gets bleeped out. Again, bleeping changes nothing about the message.
Censorship even has an averse effect: it actually condones swearing excessively because bleeping out words is a wildcard for unlimited swearing, because "it's OK, it's being bleeped out anyway".
That's how you end up with daytime television about some skank throwing a tantrum, with every other word coming out of her mouth being "fuck". But it's bleeped out, so it's nice and Christian!
Bottom line: if you don't want your kids to hear the word fuck, then you might also want them not watching a show in which they would use the word fuck.
The FCC needs to DIAF.
