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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

In the 1980s, the difference is that, in the US, the media had much more freedom to stay what they want and criticize the government. (Except for the 7 words, but you can pretty much communicate any idea without those 7 words.) The radio stations could play pretty much any music they wanted, as long as they edited out the 7 words or weren't too sexually explicit. There was no censorship, but stations had clear market pressure to provide programming that people liked.

Individually, an American could send letters into newspapers.

US pirate radio was a hobby, or an act of rebellion against privatization of airwaves. It didn't have the same political connotations that Soviet pirate radio had.

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In some ways this is true, and in some ways it isn't. It's complicated.

You are correct that broadcasters back then were more free to transmit the content they wanted. You could get away with most vulgarities as long as they were after 10pm. Heck, I worked at a radio station in suburban New York where the morning DJs would regularly use words like "apeshit" and nobody cared.

Back then, if someone was offended they would write a letter to the FCC, and the FCC would take it seriously. For the most part, broadcasters genuinely worried about losing their licenses.

Since then, the FCC has declared that it, for the most part, has no authority to regulate the content on the airwaves. That gap has since been filled by political correctness, social media campaigns, and other organized artificial mob outrage. So the broadcasters are kept mostly in line by social pressure instead of the government.

That said, if you watch or listen to old broadcasts from the 1970's, it's amazing how free free speech was back then. Redd Foxx saying the N-word on the sitcom Sanford and Son. Candice Bergen calling Iranians "towel heads" on Saturday Night Live. Stuff that would bring out the lynch mobs today in our so-called "enlightened" times.

> (Except for the 7 words, but you can pretty much communicate any idea without those 7 words.) The radio stations could play pretty much any music they wanted, as long as they edited out the 7 words or weren't too sexually explicit.

Not that I really think that the American marketplace of ideas was more repressive than the Soviet one—I don't—but, if you need that many qualifiers to assert freedom of speech, then you don't really have it. ("You must avoid these words, but we're sure you can manage to say what you want without them" certainly sounds positively Soviet.)

I see what you're getting at, but it should be mentioned that the words were "vulgar" language that had nothing to do with anything political. Anyone who wanted to keep up even the most minimal appearance of professionalism and be taken seriously, even today, likely wouldn't use one of the "seven dirty words" (shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits).

And no KGB type entity would whisk you away in the night for saying any of them. It's even vague whether or not the FCC ever even enforced it at all. Hell, it's kinda vague on whether or not it was even a rule before George Carlin's comedy bit. The Supreme Court later even ruled it as...too vague.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_dirty_words

While I think the censoring of "dirty words" (e.g. shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits[0]) isn't useful, I would be hard pressed to say that those 7 words limit political discourse. The FCC also doesn't keep a list of words, just a vauge definition of "indecency" which has been challenged successfully in court. This all only applies to broadcast mediums; cable TV stations, the internet, books, &c are not covered by FCC regulations.

While I think indecency and obscenity standards are problematic, the whittling of them by the courts, and that the courts can be brought into this at all, especially successfully, is an important factor in rebuffing these regulations as "positivity Soviet".

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_dirty_words

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