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Diane Keaton says "Fuck" On GMA, FCC Averts Its Eyes

Keaton_whoops If you haven't yet seen it, check out the clip from Tuesday's Good Morning America where Diane Keaton is complimenting Diane Sawyer's apparently plump and luscious lips, and then goes on to say how if she'd been born with lips like Sawyer's she wouldn't have had to work on her "fucking personality."

How much do I love her for that? A lot. What's the FCC going to do to her in the face of complaints like the one from Tim Winter of the Parents Television Council, who claims that unsuspecting viewers were "sucker-punched" by Keaton's "F-bomb"? Not much.

Machinist reports that:

"In June, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on behalf of broadcasters -- led by Fox -- that an FCC policy that penalized TV stations for accidentally airing expletives was "arbitrary and capricious." The FCC adopted the policy after the 2003 Golden Globe awards, when U2's Bono remarked that winning an award for the song "The Hands that Built America" was "fucking brilliant."

And I agree. The thing is, like Janet Jackson's ridiculous and to my mind totally planned Superbowl  "wardrobe malfunction," don't some of these "whoops!" moments actually seem intentional to you?

I know from being around kids a lot that in certain situations -- babysitting, eating dinner with your mom, being interviewed on national television -- you gain a hyperawareness of the language you're using. And maybe Diane was just feeling so very comfortable with her good friend Diane that she let down her guard.  But I'm not sure I buy it. I think when we see these so-called "slips" we're watching people who spend a lot of their lives operating by their own rules flipping the bird at the enforcers of public restraint, decorum, and the infantilization of what's supposedly an adult conversation.

What do you think?

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