FCC Says Bad Bunny Did Not Violate Any Rules After Republican Lawmakers Urged Super Bowl Performance Probe
The field was dark, the stadium roaring, when Bad Bunny strode out in a shimmering silver suit and did something that somehow still manages to shock parts of the United States: he performed the Super Bowl halftime show almost entirely in Spanish.
There was no wardrobe malfunction, no sexual pantomime more explicit than the average music video, nothing that would not pass for a Friday night on mainstream TV. What there was, instead, was a Puerto Rican megastar treating a global audience as if Spanish‑speaking culture did not need to apologise for existing at the centre of American life. For some Republican lawmakers, that alone was apparently indecent.
The Bad Bunny Super Bowl Show That Triggered Washington
In the days after the game, conservative outrage settled on Bad Bunny’s set with the familiar, wearying precision of a culture‑war machine looking for its next target. Donald Trump grumbled.
Right‑wing commentators frothed about how the ‘real’ halftime show was the MAGA‑flavoured Turning Point USA event nobody actually watched. And then a clutch of Republican politicians tried to turn a 13‑minute medley into a federal case.
Tennessee congressman Andy Ogles fired off a letter demanding a ‘formal congressional inquiry’ into the National Football League and NBCUniversal for airing what he called an ‘explicit and indecent’ performance. He singled out ‘Safaera‘ in particular, blasting the track for ‘graphic lyrical content, including references to analingus, sexual intercourse and other explicit themes.’
The punchline, of course, is that those lyrics did not air. Bad Bunny’s team scrubbed or censored the explicit lines from ‘Safaera‘ and other tracks, including ‘Tití Me Preguntó‘ and ‘Monaco‘. The live version bore about as much resemblance to the original lyrics as a supermarket ‘clean’ edit does to drill.
That did not stop Florida Republican Randy Fine writing to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioner Brendan Carr to complain that ‘what Americans witnessed during the Super Bowl halftime show with Bad Bunny was despicable and never should be allowed to be shown on television again.’
Bad Bunny’s halftime filth gets SLAMMED!
Lawsuits flying at Bad Bunny for dropping abusive language bombs during the Super Bowl halftime show – straight FCC violation on national TV.
MAGA patriots calling on Brendan Carr at FCC to hit him with massive fines and ban him from… pic.twitter.com/aAwb1dDbjk
— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) February 10, 2026
In one of those lines that reveals far more than it intends, he added: ‘In America, our laws are not suggestions, and no matter what foreign language is spoken, compliance is required.’ Fine even cited a line from Bad Bunny’s track ‘NUEVAYoL‘ — ‘el perico es blanco’, a slang reference to cocaine — despite the fact it was not performed in the set. The outrage, in other words, was less about what viewers actually saw and heard on the night, and more about what some politicians think Latin music is in their heads.
FCC Clears Bad Bunny – and Exposes the Real Objection
Now the FCC has quietly done what regulators are supposed to do: looked at the evidence and applied the rules. According to reporting in the New York Post, sources confirmed that because the songs in question were aired with their sexual and drug references removed, the show did not breach American broadcast decency standards.
With no offending content on tape, the agency has ‘shelved any additional scrutiny barring further evidence’. Or, to put it less bureaucratically: there was no case.
That has not stopped the fallout from being instructive. Strip away the hand‑wringing about ‘graphic content’ and what remains is a discomfort that has very little to do with sex or swearing, and quite a lot to do with the spectacle of a non‑English‑language artist owning the most mainstream stage in American culture.
Puerto Rico’s flag, struggle, and sound took over Levi’s Stadium on Sunday. (PHOTO: Pop Base/X)
Bad Bunny’s Halftime Show performance was filled to the brim with hidden meanings.
YouTube/NFL
Bad Bunny’s performance, shot through with Puerto Rican iconography and small, affectionate vignettes — older women serving drinks, children dancing with their grandparents — clearly unnerved some in MAGA world. It did not, however, bother Barack Obama.
Speaking to YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen, the former president praised the show precisely for what its critics seemed to hate. ‘It resonated. It was smart because it wasn’t preaching. It was showing,’ Obama said.
‘People who did not speak Spanish and have never been to Puerto Rico, they saw that elderly woman serving a drink, and the kids dancing with their grandmas. It was intergenerational and it was a reminder of what Dr. King called ‘the beloved community’ can look like, which is not perfect and it’s messy sometimes.’
Obama was not naïve about the content either. ‘I guarantee you not all those lyrics were probably politically correct — and if you translated them… you know, people are complicated. But there was a sense of, all right, there’s room for everybody here.’
That, really, is the nub of it. The FCC has said there was nothing illegal about the show. The performance was cleaned to network standards. What some conservatives could not stomach was not the language of the lyrics, but the language itself — Spanish being used, unapologetically, at the symbolic heart of America’s advertising bonanza.
A Culture War Lost in the Ratings
If Republican lawmakers hoped to shame the NFL and its broadcast partner into retreat, the numbers suggest they misjudged the public mood. The official halftime broadcast drew 128.2 million viewers, making Bad Bunny’s show the fourth‑most‑watched in Super Bowl history.
Only Kendrick Lamar’s record‑breaking 2025 set (133.5 million), Michael Jackson’s era‑defining 1993 performance (133.4 million) and Usher’s 2024 outing (129.3 million) have pulled in more. For someone whose primary language on stage is not English, that is more than a milestone; it is a demographic fact that politicians ignore at their peril.
Apple Music reported that listens to Bad Bunny’s catalogue rose sevenfold after the show, led by ‘DtMF‘, ‘BAILE INoLVIDABLE‘ and ‘Tití Me Preguntó‘. In the marketplace that actually matters to the NFL and its sponsors — eyeballs, streams, cultural relevance — the Puerto Rican star did not just survive the outrage, he sailed straight through it.
The failed FCC crusade lays bare something that should have been obvious. For all the moral panic, there was never really a serious legal question about Bad Bunny’s halftime set. There was, instead, a failed attempt to police who gets to embody the idea of ‘America’ on its biggest television stage.
The regulators have moved on. The audience clearly loved it. The MAGA alternative show was, by any honest measure, a damp squib. At some point, the loudest critics might have to confront a more uncomfortable truth than any lyric about sex or cocaine: the culture they claim to defend now speaks in more than one language.
