Joe McCarthy will be able to use this ruling to strongarm the broadcasters in the future, when they would really like to mention that civil liberties have been "suspended," but find themselves in the position of being already suspected of disloyalty for arguing with the censors.

Hitler had his Reichstag fire; Bush had his 9/11.

These idiots remind me of that ridiculous Mary Whitehouse woman, She had watched more porn than any twenty normal people so that she could condemn it in detail.

As for a buttock or buttocks being excretory organs perhaps these morons should go and talk to a doctor or a biologist, a shot of a rectum would have been an excretory organ but a lady's bum?

I have to admire these people. Every time I think they have reached the upper limit of stupidity they go and prove me wrong.

Paris, because she's a MENSA babe in comparison.

Would someone like to explain to these people the difference between a buttock and an anus? One does not excrete with one's buttocks.

... indeed. Or bunch of hyprocrytical pr0n-addicted shameful morons? You decide.

PS The recent adventures of some right-wing congressmen in public washrooms might be a clue.

There must be no more showing of any skin. It is the body's major excretory organ!

wouldn't the pores of one's skin be condidered as excretory organs?

Ban every program where some skin is shown!

One commercial (I think it was a candy bar) showed a close up of two bald men with their heads together. If you were first looking at it, you would have sworn that it was the part of a single body mentioned here. Then the camera zooms out and you see two bald guys then you fall over laughing at yourself for having such a mind. It was a wonderful commercial.

Why is the FCC worrying about this stuff, get back to the orderly business of really screwing up things up like this junky "Half Definition TV (aka HDTV)".

May it reminds me of Steve Ballmer too much.

About the only kind of 'organ' buttocks could be accused of being are sitting organs. I should know I spend 8-10 hours a day using my organs at work, and offensive thought they may be in their unclothed state, sexual I can assure you they're not.

Of course since the FCC are making a-holes of themselves they may consider themselves 'sexperts' on that particular area. Perhaps in that context we should bow to their judgment. Of course we would want to bow carefully lest we give anyone with a rear view reason to fear being harmed by a slight contour here or there that suggests that genitalia may lurk beneath our clothing.

Once again the USA shows that it's OK to be verbally abusive, as long as you avoid the F-word, and as violent as you can be - without actually killing someone, but you had better not show any nudity, nor suggest any nudity. After all nudity will damage our children in a far more dangerous way than showing watered down torture porn on TV and calling it crime drama.

Frankly, I think my son would be less damaged by a fully explicit sex scene between a male and female, than he would by a scene in which a male beats the living snot out of said female and then cuts her up - even if much of the truly hardcore violence is off camera and alluded to by splashes of blood.

A question for the FCC. Why is it OK to show depictions of murder in fairly explicit detail on prime-time TV, but even simulated sex and minor nudity are relegated to paid cable? Which is more dangerous?

As Billy Connolly once said, how can you take someone seriously when their name rhymes with lavatory...

I believe the real question here is, what took the FCC four years to act against this sideboob travesty?

one does not excrete with one's anus either. It's technically egesting. Or shitting to those less pretentious ones among us.

It's time to revolt against censorship and the FCC. They have no true legal authority to tell us what we can and cannot do and it's long past time that the FCC were dissolved and their members were tattooed with a big scarlet "A" on their forehead, A standing for Arsehole! Same goes for the MPAA and RIAA. Who voted you into power? Not me!

I have seen plenty of Discovery Channel and PBS "documentaries with full frontal nudity, not to mention the odd National Geographic special; showing natives, in far less than "respectable" dress. No lawsuits there!

The FCC only goes after "Broadcast" TV, not cable. Well too 'effen bad, because there is no difference and the number of people who still get their TV from "Broadcast TV" are about equal to the number of folks who came here on the Mayflower. So the cautionary statement shown before the documentary works for PBS and it doesn't apply for NBC. Sounds like inequitable jurisprudence to me.

I am one of those relatively silent Americans who is not a prude and like Highlander I agree that I would rather have my kid's have seen naked people rather than blood guts and gore.

For the record, 99.99% of Americans are not prudes or members of the "Moral Minority". They just have bigger mouths than normal Americans do because these twits think they have the right to tell us how to live our lives. Hear me now F off and Die, Painfully!

Time for the rest of us to speak up. Broadcast channels should just say screw you and stop broadcasting. Put all your content on cable and tell the FCC to pissoff!

Anyone who can't afford cable, can't afford what the commercials are selling anyway. Call it a "marketing decision".

Splendid !

It is of course much better to send a whole generation of young immigrants get killed over oil in one of the most ancient civilizations in History, so that George, Condoleezza and the like of them can get even richer. The Roman Empire began dying this same way, using new Citizens to wage wars and conquests. Rome used to be such a fine nation before switching to the Panem and Circenses method. Today, the Food is the so-called TV Reality Shows and even worse, the Talk Shows which allow the mediocre souls to console themselves of being so dull, and the Games are held in Irak, far enough to forget the "zero blood" nonsense. But who the hell gave the thumb down to all the poor sons of Chicanos and Afro-Americans, and made them believe they would be first-rate citizens after they die, physically or mentally?

Alaric was the result of Roman education and he tore Rome down. And who will be Attila, educated at the very heart of the Roman court? What a pity...just like the Rome of the Republic, the USA used to be such a fine nation of fine, honest and true-to-heart people...

As if I would stoop to comment on that load of twaddle.

and a woman in a shower.

Everyone must understand, this isn't about the Fucking Censor Commissar or showing sweet cheeks or even being cheeky. It's about the money they can bring in to justify their own existence.

Because its illegal to teach about condoms in public schools, the teen birth rate is up. The government remains baffled as to how this happened.

Here's another facet of Orwell's magnum opus operating in modern society - the outlawing and demonisation of sex. Of course, we know - as the good man explained in The Book - that the motive of this is that sexual privation can be transformed into war fervour and hero-worship. The difference of course is that 1984 was as subtle as a sledgehammer about how the Party subverted sex. Our modern Inner Party members are more clever: feminism, sexual harassment, "date rape", and sexual censorship are their tools for perverting the sex drive into nationalism. And while we, the proles can see through this trick, as in 1984 we will never rebel or do anything about it. Consciousness and rebellion are not, as Orwell thought, interlinked.

... Come on, El Reg, I've asked for a 1984 icon several times now! Where is it? ;)

Maybe if Orwell had come close to imagining the computer, he might deserve a 1984 icon - the thing of it is, though, his nation can't come to pass as long as we have a quite free and open internets to get our porn and (possibly) real news from.

Fer cryin' out loud, the woman in his story did print editing by HAND - I think that went out about the same time as Prohibition and granny panties.

Also, the world is rapidly heading towards a more Balkanized era rather than an imperialistic one; without well-defined LARGE enemies the state that Orwell predicted cannot come to pass. China won't count; the US owes them WAY too much money to get unfriendly with them. Ever.

He ALSO failed to foresee the fact that nationalistic empires would be on the way out, with corporate and economic ones on the way in. Fail.

Orwell may have been a decent author, but he wasn't the be-all end-all, dude. He had about the same batting average as most other scifi authors from that era - about .100 or less.

Personally, I'm more worried about what Heinlein predicted in "If this goes on-" with the election of a theocratic state in the US. The mania's there, all too close to the surface... and I really don't want to have to go to church as encoded in law.

Quite often I forget that eating dinner and watching "CSI" at the same time is a Bad Idea, but a naked botty wouldn't put me off my feed. The FCC needs to be sent to the camps for re-education.

Oh well , we were warned about these wankers and wowsers way back in the late sixties !

But then again will they reclassify the TV show DVD for that episode as "Adults Only" and instigate a full recall of those that have been already sold as well ?

Or is this a prelude to force all TV stations to have an FCC man to regulate and broadcast only government pre approved daily crap(propaganda lies BS or whatever) and nothing butt ?

And for the wrong thing.

They should have been fined for not showing us more!

The merikans strain gnats and swallow camels as usual.

"...his nation can't come to pass as long as we have a quite free and open internets..."

Which is, of course, why El Presidente and all his little wizards would just love to shackle and close the Toobes, like, say, the Chinese have. And if they monitor all the machines out there, you'd want to produce subversive material (at least) by hand, neh? (Can't recall whether that was what she was editing, but it's the case...).

He may not have predicted the nature of the hybrid eco-nationalist state that we're living in, with the retailers tracking our every purchase and the media assisting our Unelected Lords and Masters in exaggerating the "external" threat to assure our fearful docility, but he's been right all along about the degree of control desired by the Powers That Be.

How much would Autie Beeb been fined for Denise Van Outens buttocks last week in the Empress's new clothes.

> ... he looks at her with a somewhat startled expression.

of course he's startled ... like any child brought up in FCC-land he assumes that under their clothes all adults are pixelated.

I don't think the global superstates were what was necessary for universal Ingsoc in 1984. What was necessary was the eternal war, which keeps the populace in a submissive state and allows production without improved living standards. In 1984 as it was written, the eternal war relied in turn on the three superstates that could never defeat each other.

And while we don't have the superstates, we do have an eternal war - the war on terror. A 'war' on an indefinable enemy that will never be defeated, and that provides an excuse to remove civil liberties which the majority swallow whole. Despite fighting in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell probably never imagined that a government could take disparate guerilla movements from various countries with various causes, group them together under a single banner ("Al-Qaeda") and use that as the eternal enemy. Or possibly he did, but felt that the superstates were more plausible.

I reckon Orwell was pretty much spot on. We may not be at the destination he described, but we're definitely on the road he mapped out to it.

How many people have been pictured being shot on NYPD Blue ?

Is this OK because they are bad people being shot?

Can we show the buttocks of bad people then?

Can someone please explain to me how nudity is more offensive or socially damaging than violence?

Thanks to shock news reporting and lame procedural crime shows we are constantly bombarded with images of violence and death, to the point that regular watchers of these shows are desensitised. I have sat in a room while two people were able to carry on a conversation about how realistic a corpse looked while eating nacho’s. How the FCC can regarded this as less concerning than seeing a nice bum is totally beyond me.

Very soon the only way we’ll be able to see a naked body will be if its being, or has been, hacked up.

So hand on...

Showing the buttocks is forbidden... Than means no thongs and virtually no modern bathing suits. OK?!

Showing the side of a breast (excluding the nipple) is forbidden... So is all cleavage forbidden, or only the "outside sides of each breast"? Many bathing outfits would probably still fall foul of this anyway.

I think that ABC should demand that they, and all other broadcasters, are issued with detailed diagrams showing what parts of the male and female body may be shown. They can easily say that they can't be held to account for showing something if they have not been given an exact definition of what counts as the forbidden area. But if the FCC supply this then they will end up making a laughing stock of themselves!

That lady has a fine set of buttocks and top bollocks to boot.

I'm sure it did that young actor no damage whatsoever.

Is he now not entitled to compensation for his exposure to that lewd, lascivious and depraved act of nudity?

Won't someone think of the children?

What about THIS sideboob?

Does that turn you on?

Well it shouldn't, cause that's MY sideboob

Peter Griffin for president in my humble opinion.

I saw a documentary on a breast reduction operation in the US.

the woman on the table had her chest cut open and great big swathes of fless pulled to one side to allow the surgeon to cut away at the tissue underneath. One of her breasts was just visible hanging over the side of the body.

And yes, the nipple was pixellated.

Truly bizarre set of standards.

the FCC was conspicuously SILENT on the airing of (blech!) Dennis Franz's buttocks in another episode. Perhaps because THAT airing cause much nausea and discomfort? When I first heard about this, that's the episode I thought they were talking about. Brings a shudder just thinking about it...

I have given up on my fellow americans. I know most of you is insane, but as a brazilian who was brough up, well, in Brazil, I can only imagine the horrors you must endure.

Speaking of a nice booty, and specially a set of lovelly blue alien booty, head to google and type

fox news mass effect

and witness mind boggling puritanism combined with deliberated news spinning. That is sick, not the bums.

And shame on El Reg for missing the oportunity to report on the Mass Effect on Fox News convo, and the Ebay backlash afterwards. Shame on you!

Some other sillinesses of the flesh:

* An American city that demands, if you go barebutt in public, that your asscrack be covered by a strip of <something> at least an inch wide. Aimed at the gay boys who like to run around in leather chaps and a jockstrap.

* Where the preceding leaves the ladies who wear thongs in public, I dunno.

* Fundamentalists, Mor(m)ons, etc who think that any display of flesh is obcene and indecent. Such folks merely demonstrate that they are obsessed with sex (or, to use older idiom, have dirty minds they need to get out of the gutter). It is amusing to point out that man was made in God's own image: is God himself therefore obscene or indecent?

* Is it a sexual organ or not, for various values of "it"? I am reminded of a Canadian court case in the early 1980s. A gay newspaper, The Body Politic, had published an article "White Jockstraps Only", about the New York fisting scene and was had up on obscenity charges. One of their defenses was that neither the hand nor the anus was a sexual organ and therefore the article could not be obscene within the meaning of the law.

Many more where these came from!

Paris, as an icon of the flesh.

.....buttocks

*gently bangs head on keyboard* The main female character's job was editing and revising old newspapers and publications to remove unwanted people, in much the same way Kerensky and Trotsky and dozens of others were removed from Soviet history.

That was the key of 1984; the Party controlled the past. What it said was history, WAS history. It constantly changed the past to be more favorable to it. However, while a government might be able to BLOCK unwanted websites it wouldn't be able to revise them (except Wikipedia of course :D) so one of the keystones of Party control wouldn't exist. Besides, that's what proxies are for...

1984 depends on a very Russian premise - that the worse things get for the common man, the more beaten down he becomes. However, 'nichevo' is not a usual attitude either among the US or the Brits; the worse things get the more likely that people are to look to create change in their own way.

In order to create a 1984-style society, you'd need all of these:

1) A single political party in control of all aspects of the government, including military and intelligence assets. THAT is nearly impossible, especially in the US. If Dubya were to declare himself King For Life he'd be out of power in a week and probably dead in a month; too many top people in the military dislike him.

2) A united proletariat who sincerely believes that the single political party is going to help them. Even a Christian President For Life would find this difficult to manage; there are too many religions flying every which way to please anyone, and even the ones who matched the PFL's would be hotbeds of 'treason'.

3) A clear, visible enemy that would convince every prole that the single political party is doing its job and let them become accustomed to a life of personal deprivation in order to fight the enemy, just as people went through in WWII. Terrorism won't serve in this regard; the enemies are too shadowy and I'm actually starting to doubt that Osama's going to attack the US again. His last attack was a PR disaster and removed a huge base of power from his control; why would he repeat a failure?

Truthfully, the US hasn't lost any civil liberties that we hadn't already lost long before - aside from a serious one allowing the President to send the militia of say Michigan to quell a disturbance in California. Most of the REAL bad shit was signed by Clinton, like the one allowing the Pres to declare martial law for as long as he wants to, over as wide an area as he wants to. FEMA is not our friend. The Patriot Act was mostly about letting the intelligence agencies do the same stuff they could do before 9/11, but do it a LOT faster. I'm worried, there's no doubt about that, but I'm hardly worried about the grey, colorless world of 1984. If there's one thing that being an insurgent against a militant religious government would be, it's not dull.

First of all, in 1984, Julia did not edit the print articles by hand - if you've read the book, remember that "she worked on the big kaleidoscopes on which the plots of novels were 'roughed in'". Given that the word "computer" didn't exist when Orwell wrote the book, this "kaleidoscope" was probably the closest he could come to imagining such technology. That he envisaged literature being produced by machines was sufficient to illustrate his point.

I agree that the EXACT turn of events described in 1984 isn't the same thing as what is happening today. However, the key point of the story was not to prophesy the future, but to warn against the motives that would lead to such a future. This key is expressed in the line "I understand how, I don't understand why." The HOW is not important; the WHY is. The pursuit of wealth prevalent in today's society is the pursuit of power. What good is money, except that it buys you power over others? Power is the end, not the means. Money is the means.

These same motives as described in 1984 are just as relevant to today's society. It's just more subtle than Orwell envisaged, which is not surprising considering the advances in psychology and technology since it was written. Yet there are constants. It is not our "democratic" governments that run our lives, it is UNELECTED corporations. Governments bow to corporations, not to their electors. You can vote Labor/Liberal/Republican/Democrat but all of these parties are the same - controlled by big business. No other party can ever come to power, so the idea of voting for your leaders is a farcical sop to appease the masses. So while George Bush = Big Brother and Osama bin Laden = Emmanuel Goldstein, neither of these figureheads wield any real power - that power is wielded by the corporations and their owners = the Inner Party.

As to the "eternal war", another poster has answered that adequately, so I need not reinforce that issue here. Even in 1984 Orwell acknowledged that it didn't matter whether the enemy was Eurasia or Eastasia, all that mattered was that war should be continuous and consume production without improving living conditions - and it is, and it does.

Finally, I've also read Heinlein's Revolution in 2100 (which includes the short story If This Goes On), and yes, it too is a frighteningly plausible depiction of a future US theocracy that is also very relevant. Yet this work too echoes many of the same principles as 1984 - massive surveillance, unlimited police powers, absence of habeus corpus and proven guilt, suppression of sex for political ends, etc. One comes to understand these things by reading these books, if unable to ever prevent them from occurring. I simply use 1984 because it is much more widely read and known than Heinlein, and so more people can understand what I am saying.

that want to remove sex from tv. surely they realise that god created that arse so how can it be wrong. doesn't the bible also say something about being fruitful and multiplying?

Bill Hicks - the antidote to all those silly types