World champion Max Verstappen must carry out public interest work as punishment for swearing in an official F1 press conference
World champion Max Verstappen must carry out public interest work as punishment for swearing in an official F1 press conference
This is actually required by law. It’s party of their broadcasting licence that they don’t use profanity before “the watershed” (2100 at night). If they receive a complaint that they were seen to allow the profanity they get fined. And repeat offending will lose their broadcast licence.
It’s dumb and you may not agree with it, but that’s the rules.
Then they should stop using communications that contain profanity in their broadcasts. Drivers should dump the blame on the production teams.
They do that when they have enough time to redact the profanity. It’s always bleeped out. But in a live situation when you don’t have time to edit a beep in you’re going to have some fall through the cracks.
I don’t know if you watch any other sport on British TV but it’s the same there. For example in Rugby the referee is actually mic’d up and you always hear some fruity language from the players. And when that leaks into the ref’s mic and gets accidentally broadcast the commentators apologise because they don’t want to be seen as breaching the rules.
In general you probably don’t want to broadcast foul language when children might be watching. But you also can’t avoid foul language at sporting events that happen to be broadcast at the hours children might be watching. So you have to do something to tread that line.
And, look, if you still disagree then maybe switch to a Dutch stream of the coverage where apparently it’s totally normal to swear like a pirate at any time of day 🤷.