Friday, April 02, 2004
ALL FOOL'S DAY: To be honest with you, I thought I was done with this in February. I thought that we'd all be done with it by now. It seems that the fallout from the Nipple That Shook The World grows with every passing week, and it's possible that the first wave crested in the Howard Stern radio slot on Thursday, when the general manager of WXRK, Stern's home station, took to the air and read a prepared statement that Viacom had buckled to overwhelming pressure and pulled the plug on America's preeminent shockjock.
What followed in all Stern's markets was a cookie cutter deejay show, with some hapless saps spinning records and indulging in freeze-dried banter ("all of the fun, but without the filth"). People across the nation flooded the switchboards.
And then, an hour later, Stern and Robin Quivers came on to remind everybody it was April the 1st. Sounds like a great hoax. I just wish it wasn't entirely necessary.
The flashpoint of the latest Stern dustup, from what I can tell, was a $27,500 fine levied for a three-year old incident involving a glossary of "deviant practices", and it just keeps getting better from there. For example, Stern was attempting to play a clip of an Oprah show on his March 18th broadcast where a guest was describing deviant sexual practices ("in clinical terms", one commentator is quick to point out) but it was bleeped, in spite of the fact that it not only ran on Oprah's program, but was repeated on the Jimmy Kimmel Show the night before without incident. Stern raised the roof when he wasn't allowed to run the clip uncensored, that there were two rules of law for him and Her O-ness, and that something should be done.
Apparently the National Association of Broadcasters agree, but are expressing it in a way that will make a lot of people miserable: they're considering bringing back a "code of conduct" for broadcasters which would include promises to stay away from programming that includes what they consider "offensive" language, violence or sexual conduct. Who decides what's considered offensive in these areas? Good question. I'm not holding my breath for a good answer.
In case you were wondering, the old NAB code of conduct was dropped in 1982 after the Justice Department challenged it in court. Yep, it was shot down by the Reagan-era drive for deregulation of pretty much everything, but as the Bob Roberts song goes, the times are changing back.
But back to the King of All Media. By trying to turn down the heat on his racier side, the powers that be have turned Howard Stern into something much more dangerous than a man who wants to see your girlfriend's rack. They've politicized a man with a huge fanbase of 18-24 males, the hardest demographic to reach, who hang on his every word. Stern's out to make those bastards who he feels sent the yoke in his direction pay when the presidental election comes around. He's sworn to leave the broadcast air forever if the FCC makes good on its threat to jack up the obscenity fines to $500,000 per incident, taking his act to subscription-based satellite radio, and while I live in a Stern-less radio market, I don't think a Stern-less world would necessarily be a better world.
A nasty chilling effect has settled in during the month I've been trying to ignore this issue, which got through to me during the first day of Air America Radio's Randi Rhodes show, when a caller that let an f-bomb slip like a hiccup was cut off instantly. Cutting callers happens all the time in talk-radio land, except that Rhodes mentioned that under one version of the bill before Congress, if a radio talker doesn't take quick and definitive action when something like that happens, they would pay any resulting fines out of their own pockets. The half a grand would be cut as a personal check.
To put this new Puritanism into perspective, there's also the bizarre case of the manager of a public radio station going bat-guano insane when an engineer who was supposed to bleep the f-word in a prerecorded piece let it slip through, and as a result Sandra Tsing Loh, the writer/performer of the piece, was fired after six years of service at Los Angeles public radio station KCRW. That she was only paid $150 a week for her contributions to the station, and landed on her feet almost immediately at KPCC is beside the point. No complaints had been filed with the station over this incident, and definitely nothing with the FCC, but they decided to overreact by not only dropping Sandra but deleting their entire six-year online archive of her show.
KCRW has chosen to take what I call the "White House vs. Richard Clarke" strategy and go in for character assassination, rather than actually adress the issues at hand. Disgruntled listners have chosen an equally unambiguous course of action: they're sending their pledge envelopes back empty with "NO LOH, NO DOUGH" stickers attached.
I've actually heard Sandra's features before, and if I term it "mature humor", I mean that in the sense that kids would be bored to tears by it, since she usually covers the type of things that only grown-ups can really identify with. Nothing obscene, indecent, or even mildy racy about her routine; it's the type of mostly harmless radio essay that turns up on NPR news shows all the time.
And now, she's being put in the same boat as Howard Stern. In fact, I got the link to the story of her plight right off the official Stern page. May God have mercy on us all...and soon. Please.
What followed in all Stern's markets was a cookie cutter deejay show, with some hapless saps spinning records and indulging in freeze-dried banter ("all of the fun, but without the filth"). People across the nation flooded the switchboards.
And then, an hour later, Stern and Robin Quivers came on to remind everybody it was April the 1st. Sounds like a great hoax. I just wish it wasn't entirely necessary.
The flashpoint of the latest Stern dustup, from what I can tell, was a $27,500 fine levied for a three-year old incident involving a glossary of "deviant practices", and it just keeps getting better from there. For example, Stern was attempting to play a clip of an Oprah show on his March 18th broadcast where a guest was describing deviant sexual practices ("in clinical terms", one commentator is quick to point out) but it was bleeped, in spite of the fact that it not only ran on Oprah's program, but was repeated on the Jimmy Kimmel Show the night before without incident. Stern raised the roof when he wasn't allowed to run the clip uncensored, that there were two rules of law for him and Her O-ness, and that something should be done.
Apparently the National Association of Broadcasters agree, but are expressing it in a way that will make a lot of people miserable: they're considering bringing back a "code of conduct" for broadcasters which would include promises to stay away from programming that includes what they consider "offensive" language, violence or sexual conduct. Who decides what's considered offensive in these areas? Good question. I'm not holding my breath for a good answer.
In case you were wondering, the old NAB code of conduct was dropped in 1982 after the Justice Department challenged it in court. Yep, it was shot down by the Reagan-era drive for deregulation of pretty much everything, but as the Bob Roberts song goes, the times are changing back.
But back to the King of All Media. By trying to turn down the heat on his racier side, the powers that be have turned Howard Stern into something much more dangerous than a man who wants to see your girlfriend's rack. They've politicized a man with a huge fanbase of 18-24 males, the hardest demographic to reach, who hang on his every word. Stern's out to make those bastards who he feels sent the yoke in his direction pay when the presidental election comes around. He's sworn to leave the broadcast air forever if the FCC makes good on its threat to jack up the obscenity fines to $500,000 per incident, taking his act to subscription-based satellite radio, and while I live in a Stern-less radio market, I don't think a Stern-less world would necessarily be a better world.
A nasty chilling effect has settled in during the month I've been trying to ignore this issue, which got through to me during the first day of Air America Radio's Randi Rhodes show, when a caller that let an f-bomb slip like a hiccup was cut off instantly. Cutting callers happens all the time in talk-radio land, except that Rhodes mentioned that under one version of the bill before Congress, if a radio talker doesn't take quick and definitive action when something like that happens, they would pay any resulting fines out of their own pockets. The half a grand would be cut as a personal check.
To put this new Puritanism into perspective, there's also the bizarre case of the manager of a public radio station going bat-guano insane when an engineer who was supposed to bleep the f-word in a prerecorded piece let it slip through, and as a result Sandra Tsing Loh, the writer/performer of the piece, was fired after six years of service at Los Angeles public radio station KCRW. That she was only paid $150 a week for her contributions to the station, and landed on her feet almost immediately at KPCC is beside the point. No complaints had been filed with the station over this incident, and definitely nothing with the FCC, but they decided to overreact by not only dropping Sandra but deleting their entire six-year online archive of her show.
KCRW has chosen to take what I call the "White House vs. Richard Clarke" strategy and go in for character assassination, rather than actually adress the issues at hand. Disgruntled listners have chosen an equally unambiguous course of action: they're sending their pledge envelopes back empty with "NO LOH, NO DOUGH" stickers attached.
I've actually heard Sandra's features before, and if I term it "mature humor", I mean that in the sense that kids would be bored to tears by it, since she usually covers the type of things that only grown-ups can really identify with. Nothing obscene, indecent, or even mildy racy about her routine; it's the type of mostly harmless radio essay that turns up on NPR news shows all the time.
And now, she's being put in the same boat as Howard Stern. In fact, I got the link to the story of her plight right off the official Stern page. May God have mercy on us all...and soon. Please.
|| Eric 3:26 AM#
