No Ifs, Ands or Butts: Fox's Bottom Line

By Lisa de Moraes

Tuesday, January 18, 2005; Page C01

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 17

Cartoon baby nudity is out at Fox, as the network tries to guess what the Federal Communications Commission would consider lewd, Fox Entertainment President Gail Berman told TV critics yesterday.

"FCC guidelines are not clear; we are now second- and third-guessing ourselves," Berman told a gaggle of critics after her Q&A session at Winter TV Press Tour 2005.

Fox felt it had to pixelate the bare bottom of animated tot Stewie in an episode of "Family Guy" that aired a couple of weeks ago. (It did so in a Christmas ornament reflection.) When Fox ran the episode about four years ago, before Janet Jackson exposed her breast at the Super Bowl, endangering the moral fiber of American youth, it did not blur the shot of Baby Stewie's behind.

Fox also pixelated the bare backside of Stewie's dad, Peter, in a recently rerun episode, and obscured the backsides of the family's nudist neighbors in episodes rerun over the summer opposite NBC's coverage of the Olympics in Athens. You know, the same Games that may get NBC slapped with an indecency fine from the FCC for showing, among other things, replicas of ancient Greek statue nudes.

"We did it because it came right after we were cited for indecency," Berman said of the decision to pixelate Stewie's posterior, explaining that the network had to protect its stations from the FCC. "It was at a time when we had just been cited in a situation we also didn't feel was indecent."

She's referring to the FCC commissioners' unanimous vote last fall to fine each of the 169 Fox TV stations $7,000 for airing bachelor party scenes in the reality series "Married by America." The total fine came to nearly $1.2 million -- the biggest fine ever levied against a TV broadcaster, beating the previous record of $550,000 that the FCC had slapped on CBS-owned stations just one month earlier over Jackson's appearance during the Super Bowl halftime show.

"Even with Fox's editing, the episode includes scenes in which partygoers lick whipped cream from strippers' bodies in a sexually suggestive manner," the FCC said of the "Married" episode.

Another scene featured a man "on all fours in his underwear as two female strippers spank him," the commission said, noting that although the episode electronically obscures any nudity, "the sexual nature of the scenes is inescapable."

"Although the nudity was pixelated, even a child would have known that the strippers were topless and that sexual activity was being shown," the FCC concluded.