Howard Stern, the FCC, and Attempts to Shut Him Up

This isn't the first time I've written about the hullabaloo concerning Howard Stern and the FCC's attempts to quiet him through massive fines. Again, I'll state that I'm by no means a Howard Stern fan or a connoisseur of the types of shows fascinated with female breast augmentation, anorexic women, or lesbian mud wrestling.

However, I also don't think the FCC exists simply to make the broadcast word sound prettified and nice. In public, you won't hear President Bush say "fuck" or "asshole", but that doesn't completely obscure the negativism and hate for anything he doesn't like. In real life, people sometimes use strong language, bare parts of their anatomy, and say outlandish, bone-headed things.

The FCC's timing of Stern's latest condemnation comes a little too close on the heels upon which Stern began to question the president. Stern, often in the past seeming to sit on the right hand of George Pataki, George Bush, and Christie Todd Whitman as well as The Arnold, suddenly began making noises that he'd read Al Franken's "Lies and the Lying Liars..." and had a revelation that Mr. Bush should not be allowed to retain his presidency.

Now, there was also the non-controversy of Janet Jackson's nipple around the same time, which makes it hard to say fairly whether Stern is just being swept up in the "righteousness" of the moment (I was unaware that God personally endorsed the SuperBowl or that the violence of the sport was something parents encouraged their younger children to watch) or really was targeted for his sudden change in personal politics.

What is clear, however, is that because the FCC and the heavy Bush supporter Clear Channel decided to hammer Howard Stern when they did has made him more rather than less vitriolic. Stern now discusses Bush and Ashcroft's rotten politics almost as often as he consults on how big a breast implant a woman needs. Had they not hammered him, Howard may have very quickly gotten off his anti-Bush kick.

But Howard himself is almost incidental. The FCC under Michael Powell has been horrible and political. They've decided the airwaves don't belong to the American people, as was always thought in the past, and are something to be sold outright to the highest bidder, like Clear Channel. They've all but made it impossible for small independent stations to get on the air since they've had a moratorium on assignments for some time. The only voice the FCC seems to want on the airwaves are people like Rush Limbaugh, Oliver North, Bill O'Reilly, and others who make a sham of American values and play to fear, hate, and only the merest semblance of decency.

In this respect, Michael Powell's FCC is far more indecent than Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction", Howard's aging adolescent diatribe, and the like. Unfortunately, we seem to be lambs happily led to corporate slaughter these days. It seems increasingly unlike that the public will wake up and take charge. This definitely can't happen if Bush is re-elected, and may not be saved if Kerry is installed either.

Corporations talk with money, and currency has become the most valued "value" of all.