AGAPEPRESS: Pro-Family NASCAR Viewers Outraged

Profanity During Fox NASCAR Broadcast Outrages Pro-Family Viewers

By Allie Martin, AgapePress – April 4, 2006

Pro-family groups are encouraging supporters to contact the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about a recent case of profanity that aired during a recent NASCAR telecast.

Viewers tuning in to a March 26 live broadcast of the “Food City 500″ NASCAR race on Fox Television were subjected to an offensive barrage of language when the network included in the telecast an audio transmission of an angry pit crew chief using profanity. FCC guidelines forbid networks from airing such language during times when families may be watching.

Nevertheless, the “s” word went out on the air live on Sunday afternoon while Fox was broadcasting radio communications between driver Martin Truex, Jr. and his crew chief, Kevin Manion. Discussing a crash by Truex, Manion told the driver heatedly that the crew had “missed the set-up,” and that the car was “a piece of s**t.”

Joe Glover is president of the Family Policy Network, which filed an official complaint with the FCC about the incident. He points out that federal rules barring networks from airing profanity during family hours apply even when the infractions occur during live broadcasts.

“The FCC was very clear in recent guidelines that were handed down that the two most offensive words in the English vocabulary included one that was used on that broadcast,” Glover says. FCC officials also made it clear, he asserts, “that they were going to hand down fines anytime those words were used on television between the hours of 10:00 and 6:00 in the daytime.”

The Family Policy Network spokesman feels the Fox network should have been more responsible. “Anybody that listens to NASCAR scanner frequencies during a race will tell you, you don’t have to listen more than about ten seconds before you start hearing expletives,” he contends. “Fox knew better than to put that live feed from a pit crew scanner on the air, but they did it.”

The Tupelo, Mississippi-based American Family Association (AFA) also filed a complaint and has joined the Family Policy Network in calling on concerned pro-family and Christian viewers to lodge formal individual complaints about the incident. By the following Tuesday morning, more than 100,000 people had filed such complaints.

AFA special projects director Randy Sharp notes that Fox “had the ability to block the ‘s’ word.” He says the network knows very well what kind of language drivers and pit crews use in their radio communications, and the broadcast officials had the technical ability to avoid this incident but “for some reason, they chose not to.”

Instead, Sharp adds, Fox decided to air the NASCAR segment live, without employing the delay mechanism it could have used to protect young children and families. “The FCC has made it very clear that the use of the ‘s’ word is a violation of broadcast decency laws,” he says, and that the word and its variants are “actionably indecent.”

The AFA spokesman is encouraging Christians, parents, and other concerned citizens to contact the FCC and protest this and similar incidents of broadcast profanity. In this way, he says, pro-family forces can keep pressure on federal regulators to keep using fines and other penalties to make broadcast indecency violators clean up their act.