Bleeping out profanity became so common in U.S. Nonetheless, most broadcasters tended to err on the side of caution. Yet by 1970, bleeping out words on TV news was viewed as a potential problem, with some regulators wondering if it unnecessarily tempered the way people actually behaved.įCC chairman Dean Burch, for example, thought the commission should reconsider its use: “If a man stands up and calls me a dirty son of a bitch, I wonder whether we are giving the viewer the full flavor of the news if we quote him as saying, ‘ You’re a dirty bleep, bleep, bleep.’” By the mid-1960s, the bleep tone was heard everywhere, so much so that bleeping was used in FCC deliberations as a verb to define the practice of masking profanity. Just exactly who deployed the bleep tone first is unclear, but engineers had long used the 1000 hertz sine wave tone to test equipment connections, so it was at their fingertips. Further innovations, like the seven-second delay, aided the policing of live talk shows, allowing engineers to cover dirty words before they reached the audience’s ears. It’s been framed as a harbinger of “‘anything goes’ reality television” or “ trash TV” and decried for setting a “ new standard for tawdriness” and for providing audiences with the “guilty pleasure” of “ chair-throwing.”īut as a media historian interested in the ways that sound structures our experience of TV shows and films, when I think of “The Jerry Springer Show,” I think of the sounds – the studio audience chanting “Jerry! Jerry!,” the boxing bell ringing when fists start flying, and the sonic dissonance between the heavy metal-tinged theme song and the soothing, paternal tone of its host.īut one of its most iconic sounds was added in post-production: the 1000 hertz censor bleep, which became more prevalent as the behavior on the show grew more profane.īy the time the FCC was established in 1927, studio engineers were regularly masking profanity, as the industry was always trying to stay one step ahead of the censors and stay in the good graces of advertisers. ![]() Helping to normalize outrageousness in culture, it taught content creators that shamelessness is a lucrative industry. Since Jerry Springer’s death on April 27, 2023, writers have been working through the cultural significance of his eponymous daytime talk show.įor 27 years, Springer’s circus of sensationalism was a remarkably durable and bankable commodity. ![]() Security guards separate guests on an episode of 'The Jerry Springer Show' titled 'I am pregnant by my half-brother.' Ralf-Finn Hestoft/Corbis via Getty Images
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |