Howard Stern unplugged

With the government escalating its war on radio free speech, the shock jock's days are numbered.

By Eric Boehlert

Apr 14, 2004 | For the past several weeks shock jock Howard Stern has been insisting that his days on the radio dial are numbered. And based on recent events, he might be right.

Last Thursday Stern was permanently kicked off six stations owned by Clear Channel Communications, the country's biggest radio chain, after the Federal Communications Commission slapped the media giant with a half-million-dollar fine for airing a Stern program on April 9, 2003, that was deemed offensive. With the FCC suddenly adopting harsher guidelines for indecency enforcement and with legislation pending before Congress that would jack up those fines into the seven- and possibly eight-figure range as well as threaten license renewals, Stern's daily doomsaying about his broadcasting demise can no longer be dismissed as self-involved chatter.

"They're executing him," says Michael Harrison, publisher of the radio industry's Talkers magazine. "The government has unleashed a round of volleys that will drive him off the air."

After years of a carefree enforcement attitude toward indecency, the FCC, pressured by the Republican Congress, is ushering in a new puritan era for broadcasters. Along with the stream of indecency fines being levied by the government, industry leader Clear Channel has adopted a zero tolerance policy and recently fired three jocks for offending listeners. Meanwhile, Victoria's Secret is canceling next year's prime-time lingerie fashion show partly out of fear of newly fanged TV censors. Advance reports also indicate that next fall's lineup of new TV shows will back away from edgier content in order to avoid the FCC's wrath. And now Congress is considering a bill that would impose fines of up to $500,000 not just on station owners, but artists if they say or sing anything indecent on the radio. (Even FCC chairman Michael Powell has balked at that provision in the legislation, suggesting it raises serious First Amendment questions.)

"The indecency debate is traditionally a pendulum that swings -- there are reactions and overreactions," says Stuart Shorenstein, a communications attorney and partner at Wolf, Block, Schorr and Solis-Cohen LLP. "But this is clearly unprecedented. It's a witch hunt. In 2001, FCC chairman Powell said the government is not my nanny. Well, the nanny is back."

In Powell's defense, he did warn broadcasters last year about a growing concern over indecency, telling an audience at an industry convention, "At some point, enough is enough." But the ferocity of the crackdown and the way the commission has reinterpreted the already murky indecency guidelines in an election year has drawn fire from the radio industry.

"At the present time I don't understand the rules, nor can anybody else. They're obscure," complains Reed Hundt, who served as FCC chairman under President Clinton. "I don't defend Howard Stern. But I am saying in the absence of any kind of clarity of rules it looks like a political exercise. Even Howard Stern deserves some element of fairness. Because for the first time in decades the FCC now has enough power to put stations and people out of business and can do it on a whim. And it's not true that once you unleash government in an arbitrary manner [to monitor speech], you can confine it to the topic of indecency."

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