Television

The cable stations always could legally speaking as they don't broadcast over the air and therefore they don't fall under the FCC's jurisdiction. For a long time the cable networks didn't allow it under their own standards and practices most likely because they didn't want to prompt the government from feeling the need to regulate. That slowly broke down over the nineties and more or less ended in the 2010s as HBO and other pay TV channels became the model of success in television