This year's Super Bowl halftime show has caused great controversy on television programming. Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission FCC, have requested from Congress to be empowered with an increase in the statutory maximum of their forfeiture penalties by at least ten-fold, and as a response, Congress is considering passing legislation, known as The Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2004, to limit indecency on television and radio (Shields).
             In the USA, The FCC is the executive institution charged by law with the task of overseeing matters regarding broadcast media. The federal law requires the FCC to grant licenses for broadcasting in a way calculated to serve the public interest and to review the content of broadcast programming to make sure that it does serve such interest. Although the FCC is prohibited from censoring broadcast programming, the courts in the USA have found that neither the ban on censorship nor the First Amendment to the constitution prevent the FCC from attempting to assure that TV programming serves the public interest such as keeping children from obscene language. During the FCC v. Pacifica foundation, The Supreme Court held that the FCC could monitor, until some extend, broadcast indecency. But the Supreme Court did not defined indecency. Instead, the FCC took the position of fining stations that repeatedly use the seven dirty words as lied out by Pacifica (Smith 788).
             What the court really did was to leave it up to the FCC interpret indecency. Now, the FCC defines indecency as "language that depicts or describes sexual or excretory organs or activities in language that is patently offensive based on community standards." Contrasting obscene speech, which has no protection by the constitution, indecent speech has limited protection. By law, indecent speech is prohibited only from 6 a.m to 10 p.m, which are the times when children are most likely to be listeni...