99% Invisible - 504- Bleep!

Episode Date: August 24, 2022

There's a particular one-kilohertz tone that is universally understood to be covering up inappropriate words on radio and TV. But there are other options, too, like silence -- so why did this particular *bleep* sound become ubiquitous?Bleep!

A quick warning. This episode contains references to adult language and might not be suitable for younger listeners. I think you'll know within about 15 seconds if this episode is appropriate for your kid, so it's just a heads up. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Before Chris Rubey became a big shot 99 PI producer, he had a college radio show in Toronto where he interviewed bands coming through town. I remember this one time when I got the call to sit down with Monster Metal Legends War. You probably know War, they dress like aliens, they're very loud, they're not my thing,

but they're fun. So I go into the interview. I'm not in it. So I go into the interview, my tape recorder in hand, and the dudes in Guar cannot stop swearing, even though I repeatedly asked them to stop. The tape of this interview has been lost to history, but it sounded something like this. Hey, Guar, how's it? Oh, uh, please stop the okay. Look, it was not my finest moment as a journalist. The interview went out on the air

and right after Chris was called into the station manager's office and he was told in no uncertain terms, the interview had too many swear words. But it didn't have swearing. It just had bleeps. But people were concerned about the swearing because to lots of people there isn't much of a difference. The f*** sound is synonymous with bad words. Today the one killer hurts tone is universally understood to be covering up inappropriate words on radio and TV. Don't try to play that.

I didn't know. You probably hear the bleep button all the time on reality shows like The Bachelor. I knew I didn't. Tammy. Or mockumentary style comedies. I was born ready. I'm proud of this once. Oh, and of course on the PBS Children's Television Show Arthur.

You can forget about going to that concert tonight. What? You can't do that! I can't, and I have! Like the member list of Grammy-nominated thrash metal band war, the approach to censoring content on public airwaves is constantly evolving. Right now, the bleep is often used to censor bad words, especially on TV. But there are other options like silence, just making it seem like the swear never happened.

So how did we end up with the bleep? You know, it's actually a pretty interesting story. In the 1920s in America, radio was the hot new thing. After years of newspapers and the telegraph, now even the smallest local radio station could broadcast voices into hundreds or even thousands of homes. You know, they had absolutely no idea what they were doing. Maria Bistios is a writer and editor at Popular. You know, the early days of the internet where people were having blo- people would read

any blog. They would read anything. It was like, my day at the dry cleaner, you know, and people who, oh my god, this is fascinating. Maria says 100 years ago, there weren't big national broadcasters, and local stations had to figure out how to fill all that time. So they would put pretty much anything on the air. If you had a song you wanted to play or an essay you wanted to read, you could probably just walk into your local radio station and you had a fairly good shot of getting on the air.

Of course, this creates a ton of opportunities for things to go wrong. Maria points to this one notorious incident from 1921, when a performer named Olga Petrova went on the radio and read an innocent seeming nursery rhyme which was secretly politically incendiary. Olga Petrova was his famous Fodville actress and she went on this radio showing Newark. Olga Petrova wasn't Justin Entertainer, she was also an advocate for birth control. Petrova was close friends with Margaret Sanger who founded the American Birth Control League. Before the radio people could do anything, she started reading her poem. She read this nursery rhyme that was like, there was an old woman who lived in a shoe,

she had so many children because she didn't know what to do. It's kind of a blink and you missed it thing. What to do in the rhyme was birth control. I know it sounds incredibly tame in 2022, but a hundred years ago, Olga Petrova's satirical nursery rhyme was probably against the law. That was terrifying to people.

The 1873 comm stock laws at that point, which had banned the distribution of so-called obscene materials, including information about contraception, which was deemed obscene, were enforced. So the people who ran the radio station are like, oh my god, they're going to take our license. They got her off the air and lucky for the station, the authorities didn't notice. But the men working the board were freaked out, and with good reason, at that point it wasn't clear what content was allowed and what could get your license revoked.

After incidents like the one with Petrova, radio operators realized they needed to have a backup, in case somebody like a feminist or worse, a communist got on the air. And that's why they invented bleeping, or sort of bleeping. The original bleep began as a music that cut in, suddenly, to a broadcast that might be sort of problematic. They had another operator the entire time playing classical music. And if anything came up that they didn't want to hear,

there would be a signal to this engineer and like, boom. And you'd be hearing classical music that second. That was like the original version of bleeping. The classical music solution was widely adopted by radio stations across the United States shortly after the Petrova incident. In fact, Olga Petrova ran into the censorship regime in 1924 when she read from one of her plays on a different station. This time, when she hit the potentially offensive material, it didn't get on air.

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe she had so many children cut. She had so many children. By the 1950s radio had gone fully professional with big national broadcasters reaching everyone in America It was joined by a dynamic upstart flash in the pan invention called Television heard of it By this point radio and TV were regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, who had the power to dish out fines and even revoke licenses for any content they found in decent, and it was into this brave new world that the bleep button was born. The first bleep was created so radio stations could cover up square words just in the neck

of time. Most live radio isn't actually live. It's sent to the airwaves seven seconds after it happens in real life. This gives broadcasters seven seconds to catch a swear word and cover it up with a bleep sound before it reaches your ears. You've got a producer with his finger on the button and the button disconnects the broadcast audio and goes, I could probably do that better if I were gone. I don't need to. That's Richard Factor.

He was a board operator at WABC in New York in the 1960s. Back in the days, like the biggest radio station in the country, possibly in the world. Richard says the reason the was an obvious choice is because radio stations use something called an oscillator. An oscillator is built into most mixing boards and it sends out test tones like 100 hertz or 500 hertz or the 1 kilohertz tone. It creates a tone is like a synthesizer.

If you have a synthesizer, it's nothing but an audio oscillator that they filter and make different tones out of them. Since the oscillator was already built in, Richard says using the bleep tone to cover up a swear word, well, it just made sense. There's nothing special about it. It just covered up the anointy audio because the alternative was just a long stretch of nothing. And silence on the radio is a total no-go. We have to have something because if you go off the air for seven seconds, somebody tunes in and out of the station. While the bleep tone was kicking around in the 50s,

it became ubiquitous much later, thanks in part to a fateful Supreme Court case. In 1973, the radio station WBAI decided to test the waters and see if America was ready for uncensored content. They aired a long clip from a comedy routine by George Carlin called The Seven Words You Could Never Say on Television. For those one-drain, the words are... Sh- Sh- Sh-

Sh- Sh- Sh- And of course... Sh- Sh- The routine was uncensored and it had a ton of curse words, so the FCC sent a warning to the station's parent company, Pacifica. The whole thing became a first amendment case at the Supreme Court, and the court ruled that actually, no, you cannot err all those swear words.

And yeah, the FCC did have the right to decide what was and was not appropriate for the airwaves. The ruling emboldened the FCC, who gave out bigger and bigger fines. By 2006, Congress passed a law instructing the FCC to issue fines of $325,000 for broadcasting swear words on Radio and TV. With all of that going on, the bleep sensor became more and more popular. People wanted edgier content,

stuff that felt more like real life, and at the same time, the FCC was going fine-crazy. So, the bleep was a perfect solution. In part, because the bleep doesn't just erase a bad word, it also draws attention to it. The bleep, I think, is good in so far as it announces. We are messing with what it is that we're showing you. Robert Thompson is a professor of media history at Syracuse University.

What you are about to see is not happening the way it actually happened. It's been changed and we've got this obvious beep that warns you of that. And bleeps throughout our life are generally warnings. If a garbage truck is backing up toward you, you hear the bleeps to warn you before a weather advisory comes up on your television set. We hear those annoying beeps. The bleep sound became popular in part because it is obnoxious. It feels kind of elicit, even while it is technically covering up the swear word.

The bleep, in my opinion, actually emphasizes it underlines, it foregrounds it. By the early 2000s, the bleep was everywhere. The Jerry Springer show made it a mainstay of daytime TV, while reality shows like The Bachelor made it a staple in prime time. And TV sensors became more Lucy Goosey in how they use the bleep. If you listen to a bleep, a smart bleeper can often get the bleep begin after the first consonant of the word and end before the last consonant of the word. Everybody knows what they're saying. Lip reading will usually do it in itself. The advocacy group, the parents television and media counsel, did a study in the early 2000s and found that bleeping increased by, please don't laugh, 69% during a five-year period.

Reality TV was a big driver of this increase in bleeps, but there's another reason it really took off in the early 2000s. It's the rise of what Maria Bustio's calls the comedic meta-bleep. The moments when a comedy show uses the bleep not to cover up a swear word, but as a punchline in and of itself. It's like the strange signal for every viewer of like, we're going to break into your effective dream now and introduce the concept of notiness or indecency. A bleep is like a rimshot after a joke. If you didn't hear that bad word, we bleeped it so you could

be sure that you knew where it was. The idea of the comedy bleep is actually pretty old. Comedian Jack Parr did a version of the joke in the 1960s, replacing words in famous advertisements with a cuckoo clock sound. Mother, please, I'd rather... myself. What's wrong, Helen? Maybe it's your... The toothpaste for people who can't always be between meals.

In the early 2000s, it became a standard type of joke, where the bleep button is used so much, it sounds absurd. My favorite example of this was the Osborne starting in 2002. Way funnier to watch that show as it aired with the bleeps than to play it on DVD or finding it on streaming without the bleeps. The bleeps had almost a morse code telegraphic kind of rhythm and music to it.

I'm a second tired of **** profanity as poetry courtesy of of the bleep. Everywhere I go this is driving me mandal. One of my favorite ones was the

writers of a arrested development. There's an arrested development episode where they're bleeping all the way through the scene and nobody can tell exactly what they were saying. You know I'm in pretty good shape. You could be my dust all day, slowpoke. And you might be eating.

That's gonna. Well, let's hope it doesn't come to that. The show's creator, Mitch Herwitz, says his actors weren't actually swearing during these sequences. They would say the words, lip flap. So if somebody read their lips, they wouldn't be able to tell what swear word it was supposed to be. Herwitz explained the jokes appeal to MPR.

That was the point at which we realized, you know, it's more fun to not know exactly what it is that we're saying. It becomes kind of a puzzle for people. And I think it's about, you know, letting your imagination do the work. The apotheosis of this trend is a recurring sketch on Jimmy Kimmel's late night show. It's called Unnecessary Centorship,

where he replaces parts of perfectly normal sentences with long obnoxious weaves. President Obama delivered his final state of the Union address and urged Americans to build a quote, big-****** nation. We've got this space program almost overnight and 12 years later, we're ****ing on the moon. In so many ways, the sensor bleep noise

is like a super swear. It can be used to barely conceal a swear word like on Jerry Springer, or it can be used to let our minds run wild and consider all sorts of possibilities like arrested development. As a tool of censorship, it's not that effective, which is why certain political action groups would like to see it dead. Hello, Tim. Can you hear me, Chris?

Tim Winter is the head of the parents' television and media council. We are a grassroots nonprofit, nonpartisan organization. Our mission is to protect children from the graphic sex violence and profanity that seems so pervasive on our entertainment media today. The PTC is famous for having monitors watch broadcast TV and submit complaints to the Federal Communications Commission. They also do things like lobbying Congress

to increase the fines against broadcasters who put swearing on the air. The PTC believes TV and radio should be a family-friendly haven where content is appropriate for everyone. And for Tim, that conviction has created a complicated relationship with believing. First and foremost, when it comes to a bleep button versus hearing the profanity, especially on entertainment content that is likely to be consumed by children, the bleep button is better than the profanity, usually, generally speaking, in our opinion.

is better than the propanity, usually, generally speaking, in our opinion. It's one of those things where we don't want to let perfect be the enemy of good. But still, he thinks the bleep button isn't some neutral thing. In Tim's mind, the bleep button is kind of like cheating. If the intention is to shock, then he put the loud bleep in there. And that's exactly what they're doing. They're doing it for effect. This is no earnest effort to make sure that the program it doesn't violate in decent standards.

This is a way to almost do the opposite. You're doing it intentionally to suggest and to provoke. You're almost adding it back in and adding emphasis to it, even though you're not saying the words. In 2010, the PTC launched a boycott against a sitcom based on a Twitter account called SH***** My Dad Says. The Twitter thread used a profanity in the title, but the show didn't, and in the trailers, they actually just used the word bleep. word, bleep. Bleep, my dad says.

Thursday's this fall, only CBS. They called sponsors of Bleep, my dad says, and told them to boycott the show. It was canceled after a few episodes, mostly because nobody was really watching. The bleep button might be on its way out, but not for the Protect the Children Reasons favored by Tim Winter and the PTC. It's because swearing across society has become more and more accepted. A Reuters poll found that only 14% of Americans never swear in day-to-day life. Recently, the FCC has lost some of its regulatory power.

In 2010, the second circuit court of appeals struck down the FCC's right to levy fines for fleeting swear words in live broadcast, saying their rules were, quote, unconstitutionally vague. In the years since that ruling TV and radio hasn't been a vulgarity free-for-all, advertisers and parents probably wouldn't abide that, but the standards are definitely changing. Most stations don't bleep words like bitch or ass anymore. It's possible we're heading towards a world where and won't be beeped out, but personally I hope we keep the bleep. The bleep button is America's super ego. It's the desire to say exactly what we want

all the time and the knowledge that we can't. When we come back, the delicate art of centering swear words during live broadcasts. I'm ready to press the big red button, because at this point, I'm like, off this goes over the air, stations can get fined, my whole career is over. More with Chris Baroube, after this.

Today, when you hear the Bleep button on Radio and TV, it's almost always in pre-recorded content, like a reality TV show or a sitcom. But it's rarely used in live broadcast. Think about all the times you've seen something go horribly wrong on live TV. Like when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars, then he started yelling, and they just cut off his sound. Same thing anytime a professional athlete loses their cool. Silence works just fine as a replacement for a bad word on television, because there

are still images being broadcast. But on the radio, silence doesn't cut it. People think silence is dead air. For years, live radio used the bleep sound effect, but they stopped in the 1970s. And that's because of one board operator who really did not like the bleep button. Most of the time you didn't need the bleep, which again, you're calling it a bleep only because you got to call it something. It's really just a tone to fill that air

while the naughtyness went away. That's Richard Factor. You heard from him earlier, he was a board operator at W-A-B-C in the 1960s. But a few years after that, Richard started a new audio company with some friends called Even Tide, which became a huge deal in the audio world.

They created all kinds of effects for audio engineers, some of which were used by David Bowie and Eddie Van Halen. But one of their inventions, in 1977, changed radio forever. It was called the Broadcast Audio Delay. I have a lot of trouble just talking to standard humans, saying, Richard, what do you do? And I said, well,

I'm an inventor. Oh, do you have any patents? Yes, what's your patent on? The thing that keeps the naughty words off the radio. Basically, Richard's broadcast delay allows a board operator to cut out a swear word without using the bleep button. Here's how it works. Remember, most live radio broadcasts run on a seven-second tape delay, meaning live broadcasts actually get transmitted seven seconds later than they happen in real life. Richard's invention, the broadcast delay, took it a step further.

The machine has a black panel with a giant yellow button in the middle with the word dump on it. If somebody squares, the board operator can hit the dump button and cut straight from the tape-delayed broadcast to the live feed, essentially skipping over the square. Why dump? Why did the word dump seem like the right name for that particular function? Well, because that's precisely what you're doing. You're taking some words and dumping them into infinity or nowhere, take your pick. And you've given me the opportunity to,

I think they call them props, give props to my buddy Kenny Schaeffer, who is often complains that he doesn't get enough credit for stuff, but he's the one who invented the dump button. If you dump correctly, the bad word just disappears and no one's the wiser. We wanted to hear the dump button in action, so we called up Jake Glanz,

the head of broadcast engineering at SiriusXM. A company that, hey, look at that, owns 99% invisible. Hi, you're on the air. Hi, it's Ciprube, colleague. Is this Jake? This is your color number invisible. Hi, you're on the air. Hi, it's fifth rebech, all you know, Jake. This is your color number one. Hi.

Is this your first time doing this on the air as an honor person? No, perhaps you didn't realize you're talking to the former host of Jake's Waken Bake. After his foray into college radio stardom, Jake spent years working as a board operator.

And he says hitting the dump button is the thing that keeps Boredops awake at night. It's overwhelming because especially if you're trying to engineer a very complicated show dealing with live collars working against a clock that you have some hard times perhaps you have to hit. It's overwhelming. Let's do a demonstration of the dump button in action. For this exercise, I'm going to call into a live radio show. And let's pretend Gumdrop is the worst swear word you've ever heard.

Keep it in mind. Gumdrop. OK, so here we go. Are we ready? Do you feel ready? Sure. This is KNPI, all architecture all the time. We're coming to you live from beautiful uptown,

Oakland, California, with sunny and 73 degrees. Today, we're talking look or busier, misunderstood genius or overrated hack. We've got Chris from Toronto online. You're on the air. Thanks for having the first time, long time. So look or busier, get out of here with this guy. He said that buildings are machines for living it, which I mean, come on, I don't want to live in a machine that moron thought people would live in these stupid gum drop buildings with no gum drop

amenities anywhere close by. Or do you see a shirt just stuck to where he's good at. So while I'm ranting and raving, a birdop like Jake would hit the big yellow dump button. And this is what folks would hear on the radio. He said that buildings are machines for living it, which I mean, come on, I don't want to live in a machine. That moron thought people would live in these very passionate. Okay, thank you, Chris. Next caller. Okay. I think we got it.

Yep. Let's hope that the effect of this is not going to encourage people to test the, uh, the board ops, uh, ability to react in time. Please do not call in to test this with your local board operator. I used to be a board operator. That's just, and consider it. Now, you might have noticed an issue with the dump button. After you eliminate the seven seconds delay, you're kind of screwed if somebody swears again later in the program. So Richard Factor's

broadcast delay included a second innovation, time stretching software that would slowly rebuild the tape delay over the next few minutes. Basically, the software looks for little pauses in speech and then stretches them out. If it was a talk show format, you could kind of add the delay between pauses and take advantage of that. So the natural speech would kind of be elongated, I guess, the delays would be built when there was silence between the words. You could build up, say, within a couple minutes to get to a safe amount of delay time. If you listen to live radio, there's a good chance you've heard the dump button in action, and there's a good chance you didn't notice it. The appeal of the dump button is obvious. It wipes out the square word,

and makes it seem like nothing happened. Richard Factor says, for the most part, radio stations prefer the dump button to that intrusive obnoxious bleep. Well, for sure, in terms of programming, it's better if it's seamless. I have no doubt at all that when you run a program and nobody can tell something's gone wrong, you're better off.

But is this seamless transition better for listeners? Maria Bustillo, the culture writer, she thinks that silence is taking away important context. And she says the bleep sound is actually better. I think that the bleep is actually more revealing and better for listeners or viewers than any other form of censorship. Like what we have now potentially is they can erase the thing that you're not seamlessly erase or remove. Like you won't know that there was a lacuna at all.

And I think that's really harmful. We all know how manipulative media can be. And the viewer listener may remain completely naive to that, you know, whatever alterations have been made. I think a bleep is healthier. Let's consider an incident from early in Jake Clanz's career. When Jake was 18 before he was waking and baking, he was working as a board operator for a politics show on a black owned radio station in New England.

One afternoon, the show was hosting a debate between two candidates running for office. A black candidate was running against a white incumbent and Jake says the incumbent was not thrilled with the situation. incumbent. And Jake says, the incumbent was not thrilled with the situation. The incumbent loses his cool at one point. And I'm not sure if it was the end word. Whatever he said, Jake remembers it being a slur. And so Jake started to panic. I have a delay right in front of me. And I'm ready to oppress the big red button. And I go to press it because at this point

I'm like off this goes over the air, stations can get fine, they're gonna, you know, excommunicate me my whole career is over. So in a situation like this, what's the right move? If the offensive word goes out on the air, Jake and the station could get in trouble with the FCC. If Jake uses the bleep button, maybe that trivializes a really serious situation because the bleep button is kind of funny. But if Jake does a seamless cut and just eliminates the whole thing, then the listener could be

missing out on really telling information about somebody running for office. Clearly, none of these are perfect solutions. Okay, here's what actually happened. Jake's station manager was standing right beside him. And when the incumbent started ranting, the manager told Jake to let the slur go out on the radio. For this story, it's important to know that Jake's manager was black. The general manager held my hand from pressing the button.

And he goes, this is a news program. We're okay. I'm not so sure about that, but I was like, okay. It turns out Jake didn't get in trouble. The station wasn't fine. In fact, Jake thinks this moment impacted the election in a positive way.

Loan behold that incumbent lost the race. Yeah, his true colors came out, so to speak. When it comes to censorship, the right choice isn't always obvious. If it's a call between a bleep sound or a seamless cut or including a swear word, I actually don't know what I prefer. There are good arguments for all three. For me, the whole thing just feels like a big f***ing paradox. 99% of us vote with produces weak by Chrisoube, edited by Kelly Prone, original music by Swansea. This 1912 recording of Johann Strauss's Blue Danube Waltz courtesy

of the Library of Congress, sound mix and additional production by Martin Gonzales, fact checking by Graham Haysha. Our executive producer is Leni Hall, Kurt Colstad, is our digital director. The rise of team includes Vivian Le, Jason Dillion, Christopher Johnson, Emmett Fitzgerald, Lashamadon, Jacob Maldonana Medina, Joe Rosenberg, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Ben Frisch, Mia Bern, Jared O'Connell, and Maria Bustios, who's article about the bleep for the text site The Verge helped inspire this episode. You can find more of Maria's work at Popular and the Break House cooperative.

We are a part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. In beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99 PI Orc. We're on Instagram and ready to. You can find links to others to church shows I love,

as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI. .org. You're listening to a s***er podcast from s***zXM.