CBS has announced they're going to put the Tony Awards on a five-second delay this year, presumably to avoid broadcasting something akin to the Super Bowl breast flash. This is a trend that will not last long.
Here's the problem with it: It puts some poor Standards and Practices person in a very awkward position. If someone flashes a forbidden body part or says the "f" word, okay, that's an easy call. But there are plenty of arguable things that can and will happen on live broadcasts. On last year's Tony broadcast, for instance, two men kissed on the lips. If you're the person in the booth with the power to bleep or cut away from that, do you do it? And remember…you only have five seconds to decide. What if someone says, "friggin'?" or does a joke about the president being shot? What if someone utters a remark that many would think was racist? What if someone makes, like Jackie Mason once did on Ed Sullivan's show, a quick, hard-to-see gesture that might possibly have been The Finger? What if someone says something that might have been a naughty word but you're not sure? On taped/filmed shows on which I've worked, I've seen the censor-person replay a tape several times, listening hard, to decide if a certain word had been uttered. I've seen them call others, including their bosses, to discuss a given joke or cleavage. On a live show, one does not have that luxury.
A network's Broadcast Standards department is not, as some people think, there to police what the network thinks is objectionable material. It's there so the network can say, "Hey, we're doing everything we can to be responsible." Right now, in light of Ms. Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction," they demonstrate this with the five-second delay…but this also puts the Standards folks in the hot seat to instantly say that something is or is not acceptable. On a non-delayed live broadcast, at least they can say, "Hey, we would have cut it if we could have."
One of these days soon, the five-second delay will bite them on the ass and it can happen one of two ways. One is that someone makes a quick call not to launder something that is said or shown (or perhaps just misses it) and there are howls of outrage. The other is that the person with their finger on the button pushes it over something that, given more than five seconds to reflect, they might have opted to leave in. Let's imagine that at some award ceremony, some winner gets up and says something like Michael Moore said at the Oscars but in coarser language. The network decides to bleep and that causes an outcry that someone has been censored; that their Free Speech rights have been violated by a nervous network lawyer with an itchy trigger finger. Or maybe it's just a matter of taste and the person who is bleeped feels that what they said or did was not as bad as what America will assume, from the bleep, they said or did. (That's what caused Jack Paar to walk off The Tonight Show. NBC cut an innocuous joke about a Water Closet and people thought Paar had told something truly vulgar.)
The point is that the network wants to avoid protests and the charge that they're irresponsible. It's safer for them to not have the delay so they aren't on the spot to decide what is and what is not acceptable. Once the tumult over the Super Bowl scandal dies out, they'll get rid of the five-second delays because they don't want to make those calls and then have to defend them. Or the delays could go away sooner if there's a brouhaha because someone made or didn't make the right instant decision.