Three and a half years ago, viewers watching the Super Bowl halftime show saw Janet Jackson's mostly-obscured nipple for about a millisecond, and it's good to see that it's still important enough to be discussed in court.
CBS, broadcaster of the 2004 boob-exposing Super Bowl, is challenging the $550,000 fine that the Federal Communications Commission hit it with for showing some of a woman's breast very briefly at a federal appeals court. There, the court will have to decide if Janet Jackson's breast was being deliberately indecent or just accidentally indecent. It's an important moment, because the trial's outcome will effectively dictate the nature of what 'indecent' means for the future of American network broadcasting. And, no, we wouldn't be covering it at all if it wasn't about something as funny as Janet Jackson's milky bazookas.
Even if she hadn't flopped a knocker over her bustier three years ago during the Super Bowl in 2004, Janet Jackson would still have her problems, like the secret daughter who probably doesn't exist and the way Michael Jackson calls her 'Slaughter Hog.' But the fact is that, no matter what she does for the rest of her life, Janet Jackson will be the woman who made the world want get TiVo in case the same thing ever happened to Shakira in the future.
While most people seem to have come to terms with the lightning-fast sight of a famous person's almost-bazzer – Janet Jackson even kept promising to repeat her boobyflash if it sold copies of last hugely underperforming album and the Super Bowl has moved on enough to shock people with offensive homophobia instead of partial nudity – the whole sorry saga has escalated into a gigantic legal tiff. The tiff is between the FCC – which understands that seeing part of Janet Jackson's tit for less than a second will lead to the downfall of civilisation and all we hold dear; and Super Bowl organisers CBS – which may as well have just broadcast some slow-motion footage of a horse aggressively having sex with a crying woman in a burning barn accompanied by the soundtrack to Bad Lieutenant as performed by a choir of demonic children instead.
And, as The Telegraph reports, the squabble over how indecent Janet Jackson's breast is has gone all the way to a federal appeals court, as CBS appeals against the $550,000 fine that the FCC awarded it over the incident:
CBS challenged the fine, claiming "fleeting, isolated or unintended" images should not automatically be considered indecent. The commission responded that it has long held that "even relatively fleeting references may be found indecent where other factors contribute to a finding of patent offensiveness"… The 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia will hear arguments about the incident in February 2004, when 90 million Americans watched the singer Justin Timberlake pull off part of Jackson's bustier, briefly exposing one of her breasts. The episode was later explained as a problem with her costume.
But, of course, this case isn't just about how indecent the area around Janet Jackson's nipple was three years ago – it's about maintaining the moral centre of America. Or something. We don't know. Ha! Boobies are funny.
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