The FCC Is Still After Janet? Ridiculous

Back in President Bush's America, the FCC assault on Janet Jackson's nipple-ringed revelation made an odd sort of sense, Michelle Dean writes in Bitch. After all, "the inmates were running the asylum" and sanity was "unrepresented in government." But now that President Obama is in office, and "crazy people" get airtime to call him "a secret Muslim," the FCC has said it wants another review of the 5-year-old Jackson case. "How absolutely insane" is this?

"My point is that I don’t think the half-second or so of nipplage has done nearly as much damage" as unfair, on-air assaults on the nation's president, writes Dean, who adds that she's "no free speech absolutist." She would love a national conversation on what is "valuable and relevant" on the airwaves. "That is not, of course, what the FCC is doing. The FCC wants to make some idiotic top-down ruling about the trauma inflicted on children by seeing a tit." (More Janet Jackson stories.)