Guest lecturer Richard Peltz-Steele will explore how the current Federal Communications Commission treats explicit language during "WTF? Proliferating Profanity Under a Conservative FCC," at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 7, in Room 114, Marano Campus Center.
SUNY Oswego's political science department sponsors the free talk by Peltz-Steele, a University of Massachusetts law professsor and researcher in First Amendment law.
"It was widely expected that a conservative Federal Communications Commission in the Trump Administration would inaugurate a new era of indecency regulation," Peltz-Steele said. "To the contrary, expletives have exploded onto the small screen, and the FCC has shown little interest in cracking down."
Peltz-Steele, who has traced “bad language” from ancient taboo to modern standup comedy, concludes that censorship and free speech ultimately defy reconciliation, because censorship invariably seeks to suppress ideas, more than semantics. Meanwhile “bad words” persist in a grey area of First Amendment law, he noted.
As his lecture will explain, it remains to be seen whether speech regulation is a curiosity of American legal history or a practical necessity of country's new-media future, Peltz-Steele added.
For more information, contact the political science department at polisci@oswego.edu.