essays & effluvia: Will Clear Channel's Stern Ban Boost Satellite Radio?

Friday, February 27, 2004

Will Clear Channel's Stern Ban Boost Satellite Radio?

The government has gone into freakish overdrive/overreaction in terms of censorship; You might not like Stern but once it happens to Stern, it can happen to anyone. Ironically, you may recall that Stern released a CD some years ago called Crucified by the FCC -- which is now a collectors item on eBay.

Coincidence?

Via Adrants

UPDATE: 02/27/04 8:50PM

BuzzMachine's take on the matter is too good not to quote extensively:

The death of broadcast

: Clear Channel has cut off Howard Stern. When Janet Jackson's outfit opened, it opened a door not on her breast but on censorship. Clear Channel even sent out a press release bragging about cutting off Stern. MarksFriggin, the unofficial Stern site, says those stations are in Pittsburgh, Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando, Rochester, Louisville and San Diego. Clear Channel also fired Bubba the Love Sponge.
: Here's how I predict this will play out:
- Stern will engineer his firing from Viacom.
- Stern will sign with satellite, giving satellite the boost it needs to become a viable business.
- Buy satellite stock now. Sell radio stock now.
- Broadcast radio will quickly falter, losing attention to MP3s, satellite, and cellular broadcast. Broadcast radio will die. Consolidation won't kill it. Censorship will.
- Satellite will grow rapidly, getting more consumer revenue and ad revenue.
- Broadcast TV will suffer similar blows.
- Cable and satellite TV will grow.

The bottom line: Any medium that can be government-regulated will shrink; any medium free of government regulation will grow. Government censorship will grow until, at long last, libertarians and Republicans and Democrats wake up and realize that this is not the role they want for government, this is not the America they envision. But in the meantime, they will have destroyed a medium or two

Hope he's right . . .

UPDATE: March 3, 2004, 2:14pm

Charles Kuffner's Off the Kuff hits the nail on the head:

Surprise! Turns out ClearChannel has a funny definition of "indecency:"
So the evil conglomerate Clear Channel is waging war against indecency - they've dropped Howard Stern from the 0.5% of their member stations who were running his show, they've fired Bubba the Love Sponge, whose antics in Tampa they were surely unaware of before now, and they've got everyone from local DJs to industry insiders all abuzz about the new trend in Non-Shock Radio.

And how do they prove their commitment to decent, clean, family-friendly airwaves here in Houston?

Clear Channel may have dumped Stern and Bubba the Love Sponge, but it recently added controversial radio jock Michael Savage to its lineup at KPRC in Houston. MSNBC fired Savage last summer after he referred to a caller to his weekend cable TV show as a "sodomite" and said he should "get AIDS and die."
Ken Charles, Clear Channel regional vice president of programming for Houston, did not return calls from the Chronicle on Thursday.

Yeah. That Michael Savage
Here's Ken Charles' contact page. Feel free to thank him for doing his part to make the airwaves so much more clean and decent here in Houston.