If A Tree Falls and Swears and No One Heard It...

ABC airs the shows Monday Night Football and Desperate Housewives, so this past Monday they had a bit of cross-promotion between the shows. The opening for Monday Night Football had one of the star football players, Terrell Owens, accosted in the locker room before the game by an actress who plays one of the characters from Desperate Housewives. He is supposed to go out to play the game and, with a view of the woman's back, you see her take off her towel and suggest that they play hooky together.

Like the Janet Jackson Reveal during the Superbowl half-time show, there were many complaints files and ABC officially apologized. The story is described here.

Now, I read an interesting commentary about this. Anyone know who Mark Cuban is? He's the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, an upper-tier team in the NBA. He's also fantastically rich from his various technology-related companies and he is notoriously outspoken.

He posted some comments on his blog regarding this event, dubbing it an "apologevent." (Clever, but doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.) He thanked the FCC for cracking down on bad broadcasting behaviour like this because the FCC unintentionally became a publicity partner, garnering more coverage for both shows then they would have gotten by themselves.

The part I was most interested in was that he pointed out that "fake naked" and "fake swearing" is a laughable standard. If you don't swear but instead use an acronym or a common synonym and the person who reads or hears you immediately understands that you actually meant the explicit swear word, then did you swear? The list of banned swear words is shorter than it used to be (as decided by the FCC or whomever), but cute derivations of banned swear words are usually fair game on television and radio networks.

It's an idea that I think applies to those of us that do not approve of swearing. Just because we use Eminem-style half-silent swears or acronyms for swear words, if the purpose is to swear and to make others think of the actual swear words, then what's the point of camouflaging?