ABSTRACT
Broadcast policy evolved concurrently as the nation’s highest court considered the degree of constitutional protection for speech in the Roth and the Miller cases. This chapter traces the history of the broadcast indecency issue to a recent line of cases. Serious conceptual difficulties emerge when a governmental entity attempts to define media regulation in terms of language. Broadcast regulators have also argued that access by children is unsupervised, screening of broadcasts by parents is difficult, and privacy at home justifies control over broadcast indecency. In Pacifica, the Supreme Court recognized that broadcasting is a unique medium in terms of access afforded children, and in terms of their ability to use electronic media.
