Eliot Sherman: An unseemly move against Howard

Howard Stern is, by all accounts, a foul-mouthed man. Some have gone farther than that, calling him a racist and a sexist. Going back over his two-decade career in radio, you could probably find lots of evidence to back up those claims. My grandmother certainly wouldn't listen to his show.

He's made every dirty and indecent joke you can make and has remained on the air because he has a following of thousands. Hundreds of thousands.

That is, according to Stern, until he had the audacity to criticize President Bush.

In late February, Stern was dropped by Clear Channel Communications, the country's largest radio chain, ostensibly for indecency while on the air. "Clear Channel drew a line in the sand today with regard to protecting our listeners from indecent content, and Howard Stern's show blew right through it," said John Hogan, president and chief executive officer of Clear Channel. "It was vulgar, offensive and insulting -- not just to women and African Americans, but to anyone with a sense of common decency. We will not air Howard Stern on Clear Channel stations until we are assured that his show will conform to acceptable standards of responsible broadcasting."

While we may never know for sure why Clear Channel officials dropped Stern, their explanation is clearly bogus. This, a call for decency from a company that airs Michael Savage, a man who was dropped from MSNBC for telling a gay caller to "catch AIDS and die." Or you could point to the band Slayer, part of Clear Channel's concert series, whose lyrics in the song Necrophilia address everything you wanted to know about Satanism, rape and, well, dead people.

Was it about Stern's comments on Bush? Some think that Stern suffered the fallout from Nipplegate (the shock, the horror). Some think that in an election year, dropping Stern was the equivalent of throwing a chunk of red meat to the hounds of the Moral Majority voting bloc. Stern, certainly, thinks it was all about Bush, and I can't really blame him.

San Antonio, Texas-based Clear Channel Communications has a long history with the Bush administration. Its vice chairman is Tom Hicks, a man who made Bush a multimillionaire when he purchased the Texas Rangers and who also thought it was a good idea to throw Alex Rodriguez a $252 million contract when the only other offer on the table, from the Seattle Mariners, was valued at about $95 million. I guess when you've got that much money, you don't miss the odd hundred million.

According to the New York Daily News, Clear Channel also raised eyebrows when they circulated frantic memos from Chairman L. Lowry Mays to all executives making more than six figures annually that called upon them to donate 1 percent of their salary to the company's "political action fund." Those that complied would receive DVD players and MP3 players in exchange. Sure, no one had to comply. Mandatory is such a dirty word.

Debates over freedom of speech often make for very unlikely heroes. Stern's situation is vaguely reminiscent of the circus around 2 Live Crew, a third-rate rap group who became the focal point of the free speech debate in 1990 when its album As Nasty As They Wanna Be was deemed obscene by a Florida judge (The album contained 87 references to oral sex alone, according to VH1.com. What, you think I counted?).

The point then, the point now and the point from the beginning is that freedom of speech means dealing with the fact that people say things you'd rather not hear. I'm not crazy about Stern, so I don't listen.

Clear Channel isn't a part of our government (at least, not yet) and as such, if Stern offends the head honchos, they have a right to fire him. But the move irks me, and I'm fascinated that Clear Channel's loyalty to Bush, in the end, proved stronger than its loyalty to those other presidents that really make the world go 'round. Howard Stern did not suddenly become more offensive. The fact is, he spoke his mind about his boss' good buddy, the president of the United States, and as a result, received his marching orders. To me, that is more unseemly than any dirty joke Stern has ever made.

As our government becomes more and more secretive, issues of censorship and freedom of speech become ever more crucial. According to CNN, earlier this week, Supreme Court Justice and likely future chief justice Antonin Scalia ordered U.S. marshals to forcibly wrest a recorder from an Associated Press reporter after she taped him giving a speech to a high school. A few years ago, this might have caused a stir. Sadly, this type of behavior is now just par for the course.

The whole thing reminds me of the words of one of my favorite political philosophers, a man by the name of Ice-T. Rapping over a sample of Hendrix's Foxy Lady sometime in the early '90s, the man declared, "Freedom of speech -- yeah, you just watch what you say."

Eliot Sherman is a junior English major from Philadelphia, Pa., and editorial page editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. Diary of a Madman appears on alternate Thursdays.

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