A not-insignificant percentage of America watches its TV shows without at least fully hearing them. They read them via closed-captioning, which puts the text on the screen, often inaccurately. Vast howlers have emerged when speech-to-text conversion devices have been used on live events, since the devices "mishear" and do not distinguish between homonyms — "frees" and "freeze," for example. But even shows that are captioned in a more leisurely, stenographic manner sometimes promulgate altered or truncated dialogue that way.
A few years back, folks at the Writers Guild were briefly considering raising a creative rights stink about them. For some reason, on a flurry of shows, whoever was doing the closed-captioning was taking great liberties with what WGA writers wrote, doing major paraphrasing and condensation, often for no visible reason. A couple of members wanted to lodge a protest and/or a lawsuit; others feared that it would somehow look like the Guild was making it more difficult for hearing-impaired viewers to be serviced. Eventually, the issue was dropped due to a disinterest and because the captioners seemed to be getting more faithful.
For some time, it has been — well, not exactly a secret but something that no one mentioned out loud — that a few shows would censor/bleep spoken words but leave them in the captioning. David Letterman's was among them. Recently, this was the case with a joke about Gatorade. Letterman's speech, which was bleeped, said something about the product including "5% gator urine" but these words turned up in the closed-captioning. (The procedure is now being changed. For more info, as well as a good explanation of different captioning procedures, check out Joe Clark's explanation here.)
Here is a possibly-interesting aspect to this issue: What if the Gatorade people decided to sue for slander? They almost certainly won't but what if they did? I'm a layman but, as I understand it, to win a defamation case, you generally have to prove (1) that the statement was false, (2) that the conveyor(s) of the statement knew it was false or should have known, (3) that it was defamatory and (4) that they acted either with malice or with a reckless disregard for accuracy. It would seem to me that by cutting the joke, the producers are admitting the first two and would have a hard time defending the third. After all, someone at the network made the decision to delete the reference for most of America. That person would be put on the stand and asked why it was cut. A reply like, "Well, we knew it wasn't defamatory but someone was afraid someone might think it was unfair to Gatorade" would not likely sway a jury.
That would leave (4) as the last line of defense and that would seem shaky to me. It's easy to imagine some well-dressed Johnny Cochran-style barrister packing the courtroom with deaf people the day of his summation, gesturing to them and proclaiming, "These people make up X percent [whatever it is] of the American population. Is the defense claiming that they don't exist? That these people are so insignificant that we don't acknowledge them as a part of society? That it isn't worth the twenty seconds it would have taken the producers to phone the closed-captioning company and have the offending line deleted?" And so on, establishing some approximation of reckless disregard.
This is moot in the case of Letterman/Gatorade since, as I say, the company is unlikely to sue, if only because it would only prompt more (and worse) Gatorade jokes elsewhere. But it has often dawned on me that the networks' Standards and Practices departments, in their never-ending quest to stop their networks from getting sued, often achieve the opposite; that they make their companies more vulnerable by admitting — and even arguing — that a given line which ultimately gets on the air is actionable. I can't count the number of times a Censor Person told me that a given joke might be cause for legal action. The joke usually aired anyway and nothing happened…but the Standards 'n' Practices person always wrote a cover-your-ass memo to say, "I warned him this was defamatory" and if someone had sued, that memo would likely have been subpoenaed and offered as some sort of admission on the network's part.
Just something to think about.
By the way: If you have know someone who is hard-o'-hearing, you might consider touting them on closed-captioning — and they don't have to be deaf to find it of value. My father never went deaf but his hearing deteriorated to the point where he was having trouble watching television — especially shows with a lot of crowd noise (like sports) or background music intermingling with dialogue. At the time, closed-captioning was not standard on TV sets, so I went to Sears, which was then the leading vendor of them, and bought a device to attach to his Zenith. He left the sound on and was still able to distinguish about 85% of what was said…but the captioning helped him with the other 15%. That 15% was the difference between enjoying a show and constant frustration.
When he passed away, my mother had me take the machine off his set and I stuck it in the trunk of my car, figuring I might someday find a home for it. Six months later, I was at a San Diego Comic Convention, talking with a lovely man named Dick Giordano, who was then the head honcho at DC Comics. Dick has a hearing problem and we somehow got to talking about closed-captioning. He said he'd never tried it, and didn't know where to purchase one of the decoders. I said, "Wait here a second…" and ran out to my car. Dick used it for years, all the time wondering how it was that I just happened to have a spare closed-caption device with me.