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6ABC, Roots' Black Thought respond to Welcome America profanity

Many television watchers were left scandalized on Friday while watching the 6ABC broadcast of the Wawa Welcome America festivities on the Ben Franklin Parkway.

    by Molly Eichel
    Published 

Many television watchers were left scandalized on Friday while watching the 6ABC broadcast of the Wawa Welcome America festivities on the Ben Franklin Parkway.

"Fourth of July in Philadelphia needs to come with one of those 'Parental Warning: Explicit Lyrics' stickers," Philadelphia magazine's Victor Fiorillo mused.

Even Mayor Nutter was embarrassed. He told KYW-AM that the city will work to make next year's Welcome America concert more family-friendly.

He said that concert organizers are contractually obligated to make the free concert suitable for families.

Acts like Nicki Minaj, Ed Sheeran and Black Thought of concert curators the Roots dropped some not-ready-for-prime-time language on listeners, forcing the network to cut out of the broadcast to a picture of their logo. Alas, some profanity broke through to viewers at home.

Although 6ABC surely can't control the performers, did it not know what it was getting into?

"We delay our live programming five seconds to monitor and filter live performances (like Wawa Welcome America). We manually remove all unwarranted content, which unfortunately does create an interruption for the TV viewing audience. We have a high success rate using this system, but when dealing with live entertainment that does not contain a script, it is not 100 percent without fail," a rep from 6ABC emailed me.

Yesterday, the Roots' Black Thought responded to critics of the cursing via Twitter:

Annoyed by negative press regarding @philly4jam. I didn't curse. Nor did I hear minaj curse. She came close but omitted syllables etc.
I hear they were even bleeping @edsheeran. C'mon son! Just because there's a bleep doesn't mean there was profanity. #wack

For more PhillyGossip, including Kevin Hart's good holiday deed, check out today's column.