All of America seems to give immunity to any use of language when carried by cable television. The reasoning here is that if you subscribe to cable, you are making your own contract, on your own terms, with a carrier that does not need anybody's okay, especially that of the FCC, to go ahead and program anything the producer comes up with, and the consumer consents to pay money to view.
What isn't dwelled upon, of course, is that the idea of obscenity laws originally had nothing to do with whether airwaves were carrying the stuff, since the use of airwaves hadn't been devised back then. The obscenity laws are technically not dead, but they might as well be. The Supreme Court defined obscenity in Miller v. California in 1973. It held that that which was patently designed to appeal to prurient interests, and was accepted by the community as being that, could be legally prosecuted. The pornographers hired bright lawyers and, egged on by their camp followers, the First Amendment absolutists, set up a show trial in Memphis knowing that someone could be found to testify that he/she didn't consider this/that movie or book or play to be something that outraged community standards. Therefore, prosecution under the Supreme Court definition could not work, because community standards could not be invoked as agreeing that the material was obscene.
There is not the slightest visible protest against the legal maneuvers by which obscenity is held to be merely the exercise of free speech and therefore protected under the First Amendment. We are an ingenious people, but I hold it beyond the resources of the most creative American writer to come up with a book or a movie that is legally obscene. What the Super Bowl and the Bono experiences tell us, however, is that there is something there that still generates public disapproval.
We can't know what kind of precautions will be taken at half-time in next year's Super Bowl, or whether the figurative uses of the f word will safeguard its presence on broadcast television and radio. But that there is some sense of resentment out there is really . . . brilliant!