WTF: With More Mics Everywhere in Sports Production, More Profanity Sneaks on Air

WTF: With More Mics Everywhere in Sports Production, More Profanity Sneaks on AirExchange of swear words at the Ryder Cup illustrates the problem for broadcastersBy Dan Daley, Audio Editor

Thursday, October 2, 2025 - 1:14 pm

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The UK's upset win in the Ryder Cup last weekend seemed to stimulate the innate graphic expression of New York's more verbal sports fans. During the Saturday foursomes match against the U.S. pair of Collin Morikawa and Harris English, 2025 Masters star and Grand Slammer Rory McIlroy's shot at Hole 16 at Bethpage Black set up a tap-in birdie for his partner, Tommy Fleetwood, and secured their 3-and-2 victory. Shouts of profanity erupted from the crowd, which had already been called out for its behavior, described by European Team Captain Luke Donald at a news conference afterward as rough, brutal, and nasty.

An obviously frustrated McIlroy gave as good as he got, telling the fans to please keep their comments to themselves but using language instantly recognizable to any New Yorker.

The incident underscores both the proximate perils of profanity for live television and the general coarsening of discourse in recent years, issues that broadcast sports has had to contend with as more microphones are positioned in more places than ever.

McIlroy's encounter went viral on X and other social-media platforms, but the encroachment of profanity into sports media is becoming more widespread and concerning, especially for broadcasters.

It's definitely a problem, says ESPN Senior Audio Supervisor Florian Brown.

Not a Wholly New IssueThe Wall Street Journal took note of the trend in 2023, attributing the rise in profanity on television to a number of factors, including the rise of cable and, more recently, streaming, neither of which has to comply with the strict FCC profanity rules imposed on broadcast television and radio programming.

A noisy crowd watches as Scotty Scheffler prepares to putt during the recent Ryder Cup.

Obscenity has come a long way since comedian George Carlin's famous Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television bit from 1972. Since then, the increased asperity of expletives has led that same FCC to create a carve out for real-time cursing on television for news events - a useful tool when the U.S. president is also from New York City and sometimes reverts to street patois, even loosing his own occasional f-bomb.

It's not a completely new phenomenon. An academic paper on the topic in the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media in 2004 examined offensive language spoken in primetime on seven broadcast networks and found that profanity had increased between 1997 and 2001 to a rate of a forbidden word every eight minutes. FOX network programs in particular, the paper said, contained more crudities than all other networks, and the now-shuttered UPN network, which hosted the XFL and WWE SmackDown!, had the highest rate of such words per hour. Mild words such as hell and damn dominated, but the seven dirty words were heard once on average every three hours.

Microphones EverywhereThe ubiquity of microphones in and around sports production is compounding the issue. Former Turner Sports VP, Operations and Technology, Tom Sahara, SVP, production technologies, Quintar, points out that, before the current miked-up era, crowd noise captured by distant microphone arrays buried any individual fan obscenities in a sea of ambient sound.

Profanity was not a problem because we protected the broadcast from it, he says. Players did not wear microphones; microphones were for the commentators and crowd cheering. Replays were reviewed, and interviews were edited.

However, over time, microphones moved closer to the players, and crowd sound became more of an element in the sports soundscape - particularly during and after the COVID pandemic, when empty grandstands revealed the importance of hearing the cheering and even the jeering. That was taking place even as broadcast audio itself progressed to surround and, more recently, immersive formats, with multiple discrete channels now able to provide more-distinct and -directional sound.

The large and enthusiastic crowd at Hole 18 at Farmingdale, NY's Bethpage Black

What used to be hidden by the roar of fans, Sahara notes, can now often be clearly heard. Profanity has always been a concern, and broadcasters have used technology to find ways to mitigate its occurrence in the broadcast. [The new problem is that,] as the time to review emotional moments grows ever shorter, nearly everything is in real time.

Broadcast ToolsBroadcast does have systems to deal with profanity on the air, but, even in a digital age, most of them are very much analog and depend on human intervention. The broadcast delay, technically referred to as deferred live, is the primary way to keep inappropriate imprecations off the airwaves. However, many, if not most, live sports broadcasts aren't delayed (although replays, by definition, are). Rather, broadcast systems rely on sharp-eared and quick-fingered so-called S&P monitors - for the networks' Standards & Practices departments - to police the language of a live program, and they don't always have enough time to bleep every trigger word while keeping the production rolling.

The delay system dates to the era of analog audio tape. Fittingly, it was radio station WKAP Allentown, PA - on the other side of the state from Pittsburgh, where KDKA aired the world's first-ever sports broadcast in 1921 - that came up with the system. It comprised an external playback head, physically spaced far enough from the record head to produce a six-second delay. Thus, it was the physical limitations of analog audio that produced that interval as the de facto industry standard.

Developed by WKAP Ch

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