Can you see the B.S. streaming from my mouth?

Last week, I wrote a brief post about how you can say "fuck," and pretty much anything else, on public-access television. It's what, in newsroom vernacular, we call a "quick hit." I flushed the story from my mind the moment I filed it, but later that day TBD TV's Morris Jones swung by my desk and said he'd be interviewing me about the story — on TV. So I went on his show, where I said things like, "Presumably, you can say anything that the FCC says you can say on cable," and, "Every community has its own public-access station."

Neither statement is true.

Jerry Fritz, general counsel for TBD's parent company, Allbritton Communications, set me straight (upon request) by pointing me to this Federal Communications Commission fact sheet, which explains that public, educational, and governmental access channels (or PEGs) are not mandated by federal law. Any given county has the right to require its local cable company to offer such a channel; a county may also choose not to. But what about swearing and all that shit?

Under federal law, cable companies used to be able to prohibit PEGs from airing anything obscene, sexually explicit, indecent, or that solicits or promotes lawbreaking. But in 1996 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the law was unconstitutional. "Therefore, cable operators may not control the content of programming on public access channels with the exception that the cable operator may refuse to transmit a public access program, or a portion of the program, which the cable operator reasonably believes contains obscenity," writes the FCC on its website. (What qualifies as obscene? Good question.)

I asked Fritz how a cable operator knows whether a public-access program is obscene before it airs. "It doesn't," he says. "That's the problem. If you have some guy who's really mad at the Redskins and he gets on the public-access channel, gets mad at the Redskins and starts swearing, using the 'F'-bomb all of the place — that's hard."

So, as it turns out, you can curse out the 'skins on public-access TV not because you're on cable, but because the Supreme Court says so. It's amazing what you learn in this journalism business! Now, to take us away, here's a priceless highlight reel from Heavy Metal Parking Lot director Jeff Krulik's days running a public-access channel in Prince George's County, which, writes Krulik on his Vimeo page, "nearly gave me a nervous breakdown." Watch this mime pretending to shower, and you'll see why.