Ken Burns, documentarian extraordinaire (see The Civil War, Baseball) is in a battle with the FCC over his latest project — a 14 hour PBS documentary on WWII.  Apparently, two of the people he interviews somewhere in that 14 hours use — get the fainting couch ready — swear words!

The War, by Ken Burns, which includes veterans using profanities to describe their experiences on the front line, has become a test case in the Government’s crackdown on indecency on the air. The 14-hour series, created by the documentarian known for his epic television histories Jazz, Baseball and The Civil War, is scheduled to be broadcast on public television stations in September next year.

Despite the government clampdown, the defiant new head of the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) is refusing to bleep out the offending words or to air it after 10pm, when the rules are less stringent.

“The American people need to know this is not about Janet Jackson,” Paula Kerger, the president and chief executive officer of PBS, said in Pasadena, California. “This is about film-makers that have powerful stories that now are not being allowed to tell those stories on public television or broadcast television.”

Ridiculous.