Context is everything.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Attention aspiring documentary filmmakers: Even cowgirls get the blues, but if the cowgirls use blue language to explain how they got the blues, it needs to be bleeped before it's broadcast.

Otherwise, the Federal Communications Commission could slap a fat fine on any station that televises the cussin' cowgirls. The FCC's decency squad recently telegraphed its tough new standards for documentaries by socking a community college public television station in San Mateo, Calif., with a $15,000 fine for allowing profanity to be broadcast in the Martin Scorsese-produced documentary, "The Blues: Godfathers and Sons."

Blues musicians using profanity - imagine that. Not for its shock value in a fictional made-for-TV drama, but in a noncommercial public television documentary about the real people who perform American blues music. It isn't called the blues for nothing.

The fact that blues musicians utter the occasional vulgarity is about as surprising as hearing harsh language from soldiers in combat. But in the FCC's confusing, inconsistent effort to drop the hammer on indecency, the salty speech of soldiers is deemed OK in the movie "Saving Private Ryan," while it draws a fine in Scorsese's blues documentary.

Don't look for help from the FCC in sorting out the difference. In dismissing complaints against Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning World War II combat film, former FCC Chairman Michael Powell said, "Context remains vital to any consideration of whether profanity or sexual content constitutes legally actionable indecency." FCC regulators ruled unanimously that the profanity used in "Saving Private Ryan" was not indecent, given the context.

Yet FCC commissioners somehow determined that in the gritty world of bluesmen, where if it weren't for bad luck there wouldn't be no luck at all - a world born of hard drinking and hard living - there was insufficient context to justify broadcasting the hard language of the performers. Go figure.

Lots of people have leaned on the FCC to rein in the increasingly risque plotlines and language creeping into prime time network TV during the hours before 10 p.m. when children might be watching. The thankless task is complicated by the fact that more than 85 percent of Americans get their television programming via cable or satellite and receive numerous channels that aren't subject to indecency rules. That can lead to the incongruous scenario of a network station being hammered with a fine for broadcasting a single profanity or sexually suggestive scene while much racier fare is being televised simultaneously on an unregulated cable channel in the same household.

The complex and highly subjective nature of content regulation demands a conservative approach. Unfortunately, ever since the 2004 Super Bowl television audience was shocked and awed by a fleeting glimpse of Janet Jackson's bare breast during the infamous wardrobe malfunction, grandstanding "family values" politicians have pushed the FCC in the opposite direction.

The inadvertent wardrobe malfunction cost CBS $550,000, but that enormous fine was dwarfed last week when the FCC ordered CBS stations and network affiliates to pay a record $3.6 million fine for a single TV episode. The jaw-dropping penalty was for airing a simulated teen sex orgy in the hit drama "Without a Trace."

Here's how arcane these indecency rulings can be. "Without a Trace" is normally aired at 10 p.m., the beginning of the "safe harbor" time for stronger language and content. The $3.6 million fine was levied only against the 14 percent of CBS affiliates in the Central and Mountain time zones because they air the last of their prime-time shows at 9 p.m. instead of 10 p.m. The FCC demanded that those 111 affiliates each pay a $32,500 fine. CBS plans to appeal.

While the $3.6 million fine is ridiculously excessive, the fact remains that the issue for the FCC was the time of the broadcast and not the content, per se. There's a simple fix for CBS that doesn't involve censorship.

The ruling on Scorsese's blues documentary is much more troubling. Documentaries ought to be held to Powell's context standard. But because they are nonfiction journalistic broadcasts that serve educational and public service functions, producers should have broad leeway to record and present the truth their cameras capture. Even when that truth may be hard to hear or see.

There are ample tools available to warn parents and protect children without creating an environment that relies on censorship or punitive fines to keep truthful material off the air.