Wait a minute. Did I just write that the networks censored something? Yes, indeed. Network television has established it can be sober, serious and responsible about preventing racial slurs from marring the airwaves. They have employed a non-controversial community standard.
Even network newscasts are more than a bit wary. The racial slur can be used -- but only by the race that it targets. Thus in one CBS News story on the word after the Richards outburst, everyone who said the N-word was a black person: the reporter Bill Whitaker, Jesse Jackson, comedian Chris Rock and USC professor Todd Boyd. White reporters don't use the word. When NBC's Jamie Gangel interviewed rapper 50 Cent, who probably uses the N-word 50 times daily, she made it a point to emphasize to him that, "I'd kill my kids if that ever came out of their mouths."
It is correct to treat the N-word as a cultural indecency. But if the networks have a standard for the N-word, why won't they maintain the same standard for the foulest of obscenities? And here's where irony enters. At this very moment, networks like CBS and Fox are in federal court, suing for the "right" to broadcast the F-word and the S-word at any time, in front of any one, of any age, decrying that any citizen or FCC bureaucrat should mess with their constitutional rights to say whatever they please.
Left out of the broadcasters' legal briefs is the simple idea that neither the public nor the FCC would need to be spurred to action if the networks were to abide by the same cultural standards that condemn the use of the N-word and stop bombing children indiscriminately with obscenities.
We still have, and will always have, community standards in the culture. It's neither strange nor tyrannical for the community to argue that broadcast networks abide by them. When they do, as they did with their self-censorship of the Simpson video and Richards tape, they do society a service. Why, oh, why, can't they do the same with gutter language in front of impressionable children?