How One Carlin Bit Created the Safe Harbor

On October 30, 1973, at 2 PM, the Pacifica Foundation's WBAI in New York played a twelve-minute George Carlin monologue called "Filthy Words" as part of a discussion about social attitudes toward language. The station prefaced the broadcast with a warning. A man named John Douglas was driving with his fifteen-year-old son and caught it on the radio. He wrote to the FCC.

The routine was a follow-up to Carlin's better-known "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television," recorded for his 1972 album Class Clown. The seven were shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. Carlin's argument inside the bit was that the list itself was arbitrary; the FCC's response was to treat the list as the problem.

The Commission didn't fine Pacifica. It issued a declaratory order saying the broadcast was "indecent" and that it would weigh complaints when the station's license came up. Pacifica sued. The D.C. Circuit reversed the FCC. Then in July 1978, the Supreme Court reversed the D.C. Circuit, 5-4, in FCC v. Pacifica Foundation.

Justice Stevens, writing for the majority, held that the FCC could regulate "indecent but not obscene" speech on the broadcast airwaves because radio reached children in their homes in a way no other medium did. The Court did not let the government ban the words. It let the government push them out of the daytime. That carve-out — indecent material is permitted between 10 PM and 6 AM but not before — became the "safe harbor" rule that still governs over-the-air radio and television in the United States.

Carlin's routine was a comic about why a list was silly. The list survived him by becoming federal law.