FCC News

US media has a bit of a downer on Donald Trump so they had great fun reporting Trump's less than diplomatic description of African states as 'shithole countries'.

Politico reporter John Hendel has revealed that US TV censors of the Federal Communications Commission have received complaints from at least 162 people about the uncensored, bleep-free coverage of Trump's colourful phrase by news organizations.

Many of the viewer complaints over the controversy implored the FCC to take action against one of Trump 's favorite targets: CNN, but unfortunately for them, CNN is a cable station and is not bound by FCC strong language rules.

However this doesn't stop the FCC reporting the complaints. In a complaint report the FCC cited complaints about specific CNN journalists, such as Don Lemon and Jim Acosta, and called the network fake news. One suggested most members of the media hate Trump and his voters and said the use of such indecent language is 'responsible for the growing animosity that leads to riots and other crimes and is in fact tearing our country apart'.

US network TV is very strict about strong language and the basic cables channels have generally followed suit. However some of the more late night programming on basic cable has started to care less and less about tiptoeing around language.

In fact, SyFy and USA, both networks owned by NBC Universal, are now throwing caution to the wind and have been letting fly with 'fuck' since earlier this year.

Previously, swearing on SyFy and USA stuck to the guidelines laid out by the Federal Communications Commission, but as a basic cable channel, their Standards and Practices division was not actually beholden to follow those rules strictly. In fact the only thing holding back basic cable networks from using what is considered to be more vulgar language is their advertisers who traditionally don't like it.

To keep things clean, they usually dip the audio of either the f or the k whenever fuck is said in an episode. But according to Buzzfeed, USA and SyFy have worked that all out because their stance now is when language 'fuck' specifically is deemed important to the style or plot of a show, Syfy and USA now allow it. Such language results in a TV-MA rating so audiences know it's intended for mature audiences only.

However, basic cable channels have started to push the envelope. The word shit has been thrown around a lot more on networks like FX, AMC, and Comedy Central. The latter was even the first to bring uncensored usage of fuck to basic cable by creating their late night programming block called The Secret Stash, which began with the airing of the R-rated film adaptation South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. They don't have that block anymore, but their late night programming still airs the uncensored versions of movies and stand-up specials.

Fans of The Magicians on SyFy might have already noticed this change. Ever since the third season premiered on SyFy back in January, they've been dropping f-bombs uncensored.

Now doubt the US moralist campaigners will be reaching for their mageaphones.

Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FFC), Ajit Pai, has been forced to cancel his scheduled appearance at the world's biggest tech conference, CES, after receiving death threats.

That's according to a report by Recode, which cites two agency sources familiar with the matter. This seems to be in response to the disgraceful FCC decision to scrap the US government's net neutrality rules, made in December last year.

For those not up-to-date, net neutrality is the concept that internet service providers should enable equal levels of access to all web services. The decision enables big business to assert a lot more control over the internet and to let them charge websites and customers for differing levels of service.