North Carolina NBC Affiliate Censors Dave Chappelle’s ‘SNL’ Performance – So In Case You Missed It…
A local North Carolina TV station didn’t think much of Dave Chappelle’s vocabulary on last night’s highly-rated Saturday Night Live, and its viewers didn’t get a chance to think about them at all. NBC affiliate WRAL-TV, serving the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill market, bleeped Chappelle repeatedly during his opening monologue and other sketches, including the very funny Walking Dead parody. Note to North Carolinians: See what you missed, below.
“WRAL-TV has a station obscenity, decency and profanity policy that outlines 10 specific words that will not be broadcast on our air,” said Steven D. Hammel, vice president & general manager at WRAL, in a statement today. “This policy is based on our own standards in combination with FCC guidelines. Our broadcast operators have a 10-second delay button they can choose to use. During Saturday Night Live on NBC, guest host Dave Chappell used 2 of those words on 9 different occasions and they were silenced. Obviously, SNL is a live show so we had no prior indication about what would be said during the broadcast. We understand this caused disruption during the program. We wanted our audience to know this was a station decision, not the network’s, and why we made that choice.”
Deadline posted the videos earlier today to accompany our stories here and here, but in the name of free speech and good comedy:
And while we’re at it:
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