Dr. Laura lived by the market, died by the market

As most radio enthusiasts have probably already heard, veteran talk show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger appeared on the Larry King Live program Tuesday night and announced that she would leave her show at the end of the contract. Schlessinger made the decision in response to growing flack over her repeated use of the so-called “n-word” with a black caller on the Aug. 10 edition of her program. The liberal media watchdog group Media Matters organized a swift and effective campaign calling attention to Dr. Laura’s remarks and joined with the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), Women’s Media Center, and UNITY Journalists of Color to “hold [the program's] advertisers accountable and find out exactly where they stand.”

In announcing her departure from the airwaves Dr. Laura put forth a curious interpretation of the Bill of Rights when she told King, “I don’t have the right to say what I need to say. My first amendment rights have been usurped.” Lest anyone be confused, the current state of US law and policy makes it perfectly legal for Dr. Laura to use the “n-word” and most other words in the English language on the radio. The only exceptions to this are in cases of indecency, which only pertains to discussing matters of sexual and excretory functions; racial, gender and other types of epithets are not policed by the FCC in any fashion.

Read more at RadioSurvivor.com…

Univision antes up a million bucks for payola violations

It’s been a few years since the FCC reached consent decrees with CBS, Citadel and Clear Channel over illegal pay-for-play schemes, so you think that the major broadcasters would have learned their lesson. Apparently the warning didn’t get translated into Spanish. Yesterday the FCC released a new consent decree [PDF] with Spanish-language broadcaster Univision which requires the company to pay up a cool million dollars.

Read more at RadioSurvivor.com…

Audio, Audiophiles and the Aesthetic Experience of Medium

Back in December I bragged about predicting the onset of the cassette revival, and five months into 2010 it looks like that revival is in full swing. Articles about the renewed interest in the lowly compact cassette have appeared in as wide variety of sites as the Chicago Tribune, UK Guardian and Pitchfork. Much of the press interest seems to be driven by the wave of cassette-only releases and cassette-based labels, combined with the novelty of renewed interest in a medium many believed to be wholly abandoned and discredited.

This past week my Radio Survivor colleague Jennifer Waits posted about a recent piece at PopMatters by Jay Somerset titled “The Day the (AM) Music Died.” In it Somerset makes the case that the particular sonic dynamics of AM radio–mid-range heavy without low bass or high treble–dictated the production quality for records that hoped to be Top 40 hits:

To sound good on mono AM, you needed a dense, reverberant, everything-at-once sound rather than a dynamic, stereo recording that only sounded good on FM, which the majority of people never even listened to.

Somerset brings his argument into the future by noting how lo-fi production techniques that harken back to that AM radio sound have become popular again amongst indie rock artists. This modern take on it creates,

the sort of sound that reminds you of something, but is inherently different. In other words, while it conjures the past, it’s only retro in its top-coat sheen and could never be mistaken for a song from another era, nor charged with being mere nostalgia art.

Nevertheless Somerset’s analysis resonated with me because I’d been thinking quite a bit lately about the aesthetics of medium. On the one hand, I am a bit of a (cheapskate) audiophile. I enjoy well recorded and reproduced sound. On the other hand, I’ve been a media producer long enough to know that the pursuit of some kind of absolute fidelity is asymptotic, if not Quixotic. Every choice made by a recording engineer, electrical engineer and equipment designer has some kind of impact on the sound. That result of that impact may be more or less pleasing to some people. But any impact means that the sound reproduced by your speaker varies in any number of ways from the original sounds created before the microphone (and that doesn’t even take into account strictly synthetic sounds that were never recorded by a microphone).

Here in the second decade of the 21st century we are well into the second century of recorded sound. In this short history we’ve seen five different fundamental analog recording media: wax cylinder, shellac records, vinyl records, wire and magnetic tape. Vinyl and magnetic tape have themselves seen several forms, like 78 rpm records, 45 rpm singles, reel-to-reel tape, 8 track tape and the cassette tape. The move to digital in the last thirty years has also seen several different media: digital audio tape, compact disc, hard disk and flash memory. With digital the medium is often less important than the format of the data, whether it’s 44.1 khz of 16 bit samples on a CD or 128kbps of compressed MP3. Whether analog or digital, what remains true is that the medium is operative and important.

For listeners, the delivery medium is the variable we have the closest relationship to, and the most control over. We can choose to listen to a CD or an MP3. Twenty years ago people often made the choice between cassette or vinyl. While the choice was often dictated by economics or convenience–vinyl doesn’t play so well in a moving vehicle–the quality of sound was and is often an important consideration. At this point I want to refine the use of the word “quality” with regard to sound. Often we think of sound quality as meaning having greater fidelity, or more closely resembling the original sound recorded in the studio. However, quality also means the nature and dimension of something; a leaf may have the quality of being “green.” Similarly, a reproduced sound may have the quality of being quiet, bass-heavy or sibilant. When speaking of playback medium, then, the notion of sound quality in this respect is important.

Audiophiles primarily argue about the relative fidelity of a playback medium and therefore its ability to reproduce what is believed to be the full simulacrum of the original performance or recording. Of course, the question is never that simple, since everything in the playback chain, from the player itself to amplifiers, speakers and the cables that connect them have some role to play as well. Yet, it’s generally believed that the source medium dictates the fundamental potential for fidelity and the nature of the sound quality heard over speakers or headphones.

Amongst commonly available formats, in the audiophile world CDs and vinyl records are generally held to have the greatest potential for fidelity and sound quality which is relatively uncolored and unmodified from the original recording. Each medium has its adherents who present good arguments for their superiority, or potential superiority. By comparison, cassettes and MP3s have garnered cautious acceptance as inherently compromised media that might be coxed to provide adequate fidelity in exchange for convenience and other lesser reasons.

What seems to mystify many audiophiles is why anyone would prefer cassettes (or MP3s) for recording or playback if things like mobile playback and other logistical practicalities were factored out. I contend that’s because of principle concern of audiophile pursuits is this quest for perfection, for fidelity, overall. If a medium introduces some degree of coloration or change in the sound on hears that’s a deviation from fidelity, it’s inherently a distortion of the original intent of the artist, producer or engineer.

Nearly three decades into the CD era audiophiles generally recognize that even the best vinyl or CD playback systems introduce this deviation from fidelity. Yet, they still nakedly pursue that elusive fidelity all the more fervently the more minute–and costly–each improvement becomes.

At this point in time the average adult music lover has likely personally experienced at least three distinct playback media. Someone who’s eighteen probably has heard cassettes, CDs and MP3s. Someone who’s thirty probably had vinyl as a child, and might have used 8-tracks, too. And now, years after LPs and cassettes were supposed to be dead and replaced by digital audio playback, they’re still with us.

Instead of a Darwinian evolution of playback medium towards something–like CDs–which is inherently superior to those that came before, today we have a menu of playback media before us. It’s as if Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal men were browsing next to us Homo Sapien Sapiens at the supermarket and making themselves available on Match.com.

With the vinyl revival in full swing, the music fan in a good indie record shop again has the choice of whether to buy an album on CD or vinyl. She also can choose to hit up the iTunes music store for an AAC music file or browse to Amazon for an MP3. Heck, she might luck out with an MP3 download code coming for free along with that vinyl purchase. And with the cassette revival just starting to heat up she might be able to find a few more limited releases on cassette, too.

So what dictates the choice amongst these media? Obviously, practicality is the biggest factor — if you don’t have a turntable or cassette player then a record or cassette isn’t likely to be your first choice. The next factor is probably whether or not the release is available on other formats. If you’re coveting a vinyl-only, cassette-only or MP3-only release, then your choice is made for you.

After pragmatics, the biggest choice is aesthetics. If you can get an album or CD or vinyl, why choose vinyl when CD is presumably the fittest medium? I say for myself that I like and enjoy the particular aesthetic peculiarities of vinyl records. From the physical dimensions of the cover and the record itself, to its sonic quality when played back on a decent turntable, I like whatever changes or distortions that vinyl records introduce into the sound playback experience.

It may be that vinyl records have more fidelity, that CDs represent more of an aberration. Or it may be that vinyl’s tonal curve more closely matches the human ear’s sensitivity. It might just be some potent combination of nostalgia, age-related hearing loss and psychology. In the end, it kinda doesn’t matter, as long as I like and enjoy the sound and experience.

Back to cassettes, I have both fond and not-so-fond memories of them. Rocking a favorite mix tape in the car stereo is a favorite memory, while fishing out a string of disembowled tape from a broken deck is not. But I can also distinctly remember buying an album on CD that I’d only ever heard on cassette and being profoundly disappointed. The apparent clarity and revealing quality of the CD seemed to ruin the experience I’d always had with the tape.

We live in an era of aesthetic choice. Other artistic media are experiencing the effects of this array of choices, too. Photographic film, even Polaroids, are seeing a revival a decade into mainstream digital photography. Visual artists are embracing letter press and other supposedly antiquated printing methods. High definition video still hasn’t displaced 35mm motion picture film, while 8mm movies are seeing a small underground resurgence. Not too many people are making the arguments that these older forms are better than the newer. Instead, they’re just different, and sometimes more interesting or pleasing.

For most of the short history of recorded sound the goal of fidelity has ruled the roost. But with the cycle of obsolescence for playback media becoming ever shorter, there’s also a growing weariness with being forced to abandon a particular medium just because something else is purported to be better.

Those of us who never dumped our vinyl records knew that they still sounded good, even if different from CDs. Why upgrade something that works?

In 1992 that seemed like an almost farcical, luddite attitude. Today, when people feel like they’re being asked to abandon their CDs and DVDs that replaced their VHS tapes and cassettes, it starts sounding more logical. Beyond mere economics, we’re left to consider what we liked about these media to begin with.

Vinyl sounds different than CDs just like watercolor looks different than oil paints. If fidelity was the ultimate consideration, then why didn’t photography obliterate portraiture?

The music lover now faces a richer world where she can choose how she hears her music, and the musician can choose how its delivered. Those choices have both meaning and quality. The choices give both more control over the experience.

What’s wrong with that?

What I’ve Been Up To Elsewhere

It looks like my challenge for 2010 is to see how many simultaneous writing projects I can keep up. What I’m learning so far is that the projects involving other people seem to gain my attention better than my nine-year-old blog here. Also, I enrolled in distance education certificate program that is also soaking up quite a few hours a week.

However, if you’re interested here’s some of the things I’ve written recently elsewhere.

At Radio Survivor I’ve discussed two of my favorite commercial radio stations, WDHA and WXRT. Yes, despite my undying loyalty to college, community and public radio, there have been a few commercial stations that rise above and make it into my radios once in a while.

Of particular interest to the typical mediageek reader should be my report on the fifty-nine new noncommerical radio licenses the FCC recently issued. Interestingly, five of these licenses went to current low-power FM stations.

I’ve stepped up my output for Streaming Media Magazine and StreamingMedia.com, trying to cover more stories related to video in education. My new biweekly series is called Video.edu. The first first edition I covered UCLA pulling streaming videos after receiving a legal threat and changes to educational technology funding in Obama’s 2011 budget. In the second one I wrote about the library copyright alliance defending educational streaming of copyrighted video and a Yale admissions video that’s gone viral.

My two most recent magazine columns are a 2009 year-in-review of video in education and a rumination on where is the teaching video camera of today.

Life Inc., Publishing and Radio

I really enjoyed my conversation with Douglas Rushkoff, discussing his new book Life, Inc; How the World Became a Corporation and How To Take It Back. The first part of this interview is on this week’s edition of the mediageek radioshow.

I find that Doug is articulating very clearly a lot of ideas that have also been rattling around my ahead for the last decade or so, but he’s made the effort to research them and flesh them out in print both in his book and in a growing series of columns and essays. What I like about his analytical approach is his willingness to attempt to get outside our contemporary assumptions about daily life and try to figure out when and how something, like the corporation, was brought into existence. I also appreciate that he’s willing to continue prodding at a question even when the answers are murky, showing a willingness to accept there are some apparent conflicts in the messy reality of daily life.

He recently wrote a piece for Publisher’s Weekly arguing that the publishing business is very ill-suited to corporate consolidation. He notes that book publishing is a sustainable business, but not a source of tremendous year-over-year growth of the sort a large corporation needs. But he remains sanguine about the future of publishing because the expert editors, publishers and writers haven’t gone away and are ready to rebuild the industry, perhaps with new independent houses.

I see some parallel with the radio business, although radio has been far more decimated than publishing. The root problem is the same: the large consolidating companies treated radio as a commodities business, seeking unreasonable profit growth that the business could not sustain. Radio differs from publishing in the fact that stations must be licensed and are therefore inherently limited in number, whereas publishing houses can be more easily started with less capital and require no licensing of any sort.

If new independents could start radio stations without having to try and pry licenses away from the likes of Clear Channel and Cumulus, I think we’d already be seeing some innovative rebooting of the industry. Unfortunately, radio is more like a neighborhood where the landowners have all let their properties get run down but refuse to sell them because scarcity still keeps the going rate artificially high.

In some sporadic cases we see innovation happening in public and community radio, where license holders can keep their stations sustainable but don’t have to rake in enormous profits. I just keep hoping that Clear Channel will finally bite the bullet and need to start shedding stations left and right, giving an opportunity for smaller, local and independent owners to get back into the game. Admittedly, it’s a more distant hope than the reinvigoration of the publishing industry, since another smaller consolidator, like CBS Radio, might choose to pack its stables, outbidding smaller players.

That’s the problem with licensing, and, to an extent, why the founding fathers organized against the Stamp Act of 1765. As it was designed, radio pretty much needs to be licensed because it was premised on scarcity partially imposed by the technological limits of 1927. But it’s not necessarily an inherent fact about radio. Perhaps the future of wireless communications will render this period of licensing a short historical anomaly. It’s an open question and no better than a 50/50 proposition right now.

Doug has his own relatively new radio show, The Media Squat, on the great noncommercial station, WFMU. In the interview we talked about his program and our shared challenged of trying to do an original weekly program on a completely volunteer, non-profit basis. That part of the interview will air on the next edition of mediageek. You can listen to it live on Thursday, Sept. 10, at 9 PM Central time on WNUR 89.3 FM in Chicago and online at http://www.wnur.org. Of course, the program will be archived online next week.

Happy 5th Birthday to Podcasting!

With the word “podcasting” firmly entrenched in the English language it’s a bit hard to believe that the medium is only five years old. Wired’s This Day in Tech marked yesterday, Aug. 13 as the fifth anniversary of the start of Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, the first widely popular podcast.

This Day in Tech dutifully notes that the first actual podcast came one day earlier in the form of RSS pioneer Dave Winer’s Morning Coffee Notes, but that it was Curry’s podcast that quickly popularized the idea.

And what was that idea in the first place? The notion of having a regular radio program online was not remotely new by 2004. It was no problem listening to popular public radio programs like This American Life online. Even my little old radioshow was posted for download before Curry and Winer coined the term “podcast.”

The key innovation of podcasting was to make it easy to subscribe to a feed so that the programs would be downloaded to your computer automatically. No more checking a site over and over to see if a new show was posted. Simple, but effective.

The interesting thing about podcasting is that this little bit of tech has become so ingrained in our culture already that “podcast” has become pretty much synonymous with “online radio program.” When podcasting became a hot trend in educational media, ’round about 2005 and 2006, I presented several workshops on the topic. My first order of business was always to point out the simplicity of the concept and also clarify the fact that a podcast, by definition, refers to a series of audio programs that one can subscribe to, not just an audio program posted online.

The reason I felt the need to clarify so strongly is that as an educational media producer I started having many clients come asking for us to podcast a lecture. I would always ask if they were planning to have a series of lectures or other programs. And more than half the time, the answer was “no, we’re just having this one.” My response would be, “so what you really want is to record this lecture and make it available on a webpage?” And the typical answer would be, “Yes, that’s right, we want a podcast.”

Ugh.

Of course, it was no problem to record the lecture and post the MP3 online (nevermind the clients who didn’t want their “podcast” to be downloaded–just streamed). But there was no reason anyone would subscribe to this “podcast” since there would never be episode #2. It was also a little frustrating because clients would act as if it had never been possible to post audio programs online before, despite the fact that my department had been offering it as a service for at least five years by that point.

Eventually I gave up on explaining the difference because it became obvious that nobody cared, and the difference didn’t really cause any problems.

The very positive legacy of podcasting is that the idea greatly revitalized and popularized online radio, spawning thousands, if not millions, of new audio programs created by amateurs, professionals and creative people of all types. But make no mistake, radio producers had been posting their audio online since the invention of the web. In fact, one the pioneering archives of online community radio content, the A-Info Radio Project, started in 1996–eight years before podcasting–and continues to go strong today.

So, Happy Birthday to the podcast, and may a million more be born and syndicated.

The Past, Present and Future Survival of Radio

The mediageek radioshow‘s informal multi-week focus on the medium of radio wraps up this Thursday with guest Jerry Del Colliano. For 28 years he published the radio industry newsletter Inside Radio, was clinical professor of the music industry at the University of Southern California and now publishes the blog Inside Music Media. Del Colliano had a unique vantage point to watch the consolidation and downfall of commercial radio, and he saw it coming. Now on his blog he documents the foundering of Clear Channel and other major broadcasters while forecasting the future of music media, with or without radio.

Tune in this Thursday June 18 at 9 PM CDT to 89.3 FM WNUR in Chicago on your analog radio or listen online at wnur.org. Of course the show will be available for podcast and download by Sunday at midnight at the radioshow site.

Continuing on the radio tip, I would like to now announce that I’ve embarked on a new group blog project focused on radio, along with two other collaborators who are both astute observers of the medium. The new blog is RadioSurvivor.com. My collaborators are the dogged FCC watcher, media historian and Ars Technica writer Matthew Lasar and Jennifer Waits, the woman behind the Spinning Indie blog and an expert on the history and vital role of college radio.

Our goal with the RadioSurvivor is to provide comprehensive coverage of radio from a variety of perspectives, from policy and regulation to technology and programming. We’re fans of radio and believe strongly in its viability as a medium with a future, despite the major commercial owners doing their best to run their stations into the ground.

Taking on RadioSurvivor doesn’t mean I’ll post here less. In fact, I think this will spur me to incorporate some new topics into the mediageek blog while I publish my more radio-centric material at RadioSurvivor.

Being a group blog our plan is to make sure RadioSurvivor has lots of fresh content every week — more than any one of us can do on our own. I hope you’ll check it out. Your comments are welcome!

Sometimes the Grassroots Wins: KRXQ Hosts Apologize for Defaming Transgendered Children

What a couple of weeks it’s been for Sacramento radio station KRXQ and its wacky morning show hosts Rob, Arnie & Dawn. Their travails in meeting the wrath of outraged supporters of transgendered adults and children ended this morning when the hosts apologized on air and engaged in an open conversation with transgendered people and advocates. But it took quite a bit of pressure to get them to see the light.

Last week I told you about their May 28 broadcast wherein Arnie States talked about how he would hit his son with a shoe if he found him crossdressing, as part of a half-hour discussion generally defaming transgendered children. When word of this disgusting broadcast started to get around folks like myself who found good reason to be outraged at the broadcast took aim at the station.

Of course, as I noted, there was nothing particularly illegal about the broadcast, failing to meet the standard of being indecent. So FCC action was out of the question. Instead folks took aim at KRXQ’s advertisers, asking them to listen to archives of the May 28 program and judge for themselves if that’s the sort of intolerant rhetoric they want to sponsor.

For a large portion of the station’s national sponsors, the answer was a resounding “no.” By June 4, about 4 days into national publicity of the program, major advertisers Chipotle Grill, Snapple and Sonic Drive-In pulled their accounts from the station in response to it. The count was up to ten lost accounts by the next day following a wholly unrepentant broadcast on June 4 when Rob and Arnie attempted to defend themselves by explaining that the May 28 broadcast was just a joke.

Not long thereafter KRXQ pulled its list of advertisers from the station’s website as more local and national sponsors got wind of not only how awful the May 28 broadcast was but how boneheaded Arnie and Rob were in defending themselves on air rather than thoughtfully considering the concerns of listeners, transgendered people and their supporters. Just like the June 4 show where the hosts were supposed to be seriously taking up the ramifications of their May 28 broadcast, pulling the advertiser list was another example of too-little, too-late, since lists of the station’s advertisers had been circulating freely across twitter, facebook and blogs for days.

Pressure got high enough that by Friday June 5 station management reached out to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) to try and find a resolution to the situation. On the following Monday, June 7, the Rob, Arnie and Dawn show didn’t air in its usual timeslot. Instead, Rob Williams, who actually owns and produces the show, posted a statement on the show’s and on the station’s website saying the program would be off air until today, June 11. In his statement Williams acknowledged, (in original all caps):

WE HAVE FAILED YOU. AS A SHOW, AS PEOPLE, AS BROADCASTERS, WE HAVE SIMPLY FAILED ON ALMOST EVERY LEVEL.

WE PRESENTED OUR OPINIONS ON A VERY SENSITIVE SUBJECT IN A HATEFUL, CHILDISH AND CRUDE FASHION; AND THEN, GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY TO RETRACT THOSE REMARKS, WE DEFENDED THEM. …

By the time Rob Williams and Arnie States publicly apologized on their show this morning, their dehumanizing statements and arrogant and ignorant attempts to defend themselves had cost the biggest station carrying their program over thirteen local and national advertisers. Their co-host Dawn Rossi owed no personal apology for the broadcast because she actively tried to both defend transgendered people during the May 28 show and made other reasonable on air arguments against Arnie and Rob’s defaming tirade and ignorant defense.

I’d like to hope that both Arnie States and Rob Williams have truly acknowledged the damage that their words inflicted, I also have no doubt that the financial strike of so many advertisers pulling their accounts did much to change their attitudes. In an era when the public service obligations of broadcasters is a lip-service joke rather than a real an enforceable requirement, hitting stations in the pocketbook is a very effective tool for making them acknowledge the rights of minorities of all stripes.

In the corporate radio world Rob Williams and Arnie States are tiny players. And while their forced about-face on the issue of transgendered children is a victory, it’s still a small one. Unfortunately other radio hosts who deal in hatred towards minorities like Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh have a much stronger base of support both in terms of advertisers, listeners and mainstream credibility. But I don’t think they’re immune either.

Demonstrating just how vulnerable they might be, Rockstar energy drink has threatened Alternet with a defamation lawsuit for publicizing the hard-to-deny connection between right-wing insane hate-spewing radio host Michael Savage and his son, Russell Weiner, who is the founder and CEO of the company. It’s not just a father-son connection, however. According to Alternet, “Savage’s wife serves as director of energy drink company, and Savage Productions shares an address with Rockstar(!).”

Apparently at the behest of Rockstar, facebook took down a group encouraging a boycott of Rockstar, which recently established a lucrative distribution deal with Pepsi.

Seems like even Savage’s own son’s company is a little nervous about its connection to the right-wing violent hate spewed on the Michael Savage show. I wonder how nervous Pepsi might be with the connection, too?

KRXQ Loses National Advertisers For Broadcast Defaming Transgendered Children

Two days of contacting Sacramento rock station KRXQ’s advertisers regarding the station’s May 28 broadcast defaming and advocating abuse of transgendered children has gotten results. Chipotle Grill, Snapple and Sonic Drive-In have all pulled their ads from the station in response to the broadcast.

KRXQ general manager Jim Fox acknowledged to the Sacramento Bee that there have been some ad accounts canceled, but he wouldn’t say what the station would be doing in response. Well, one thing the station did was pull the list of advertisers that was on their website just a day ago. In this case, it’s Google Cache to the rescue (in case the cache expires, see the list after the jump).

I do have to thank Chipotle, Snapple and Sonic for doing the right thing by not ignoring this disgusting example of homophobia. But there are more advertisers who are still bankrolling this kind of defamation on KRXQ and elsewhere. And while these three companies decided to do the right thing, there is an economic element, too. My guess is that these three companies wisely realized that they would benefit by doing the right thing, earning or retaining more loyal customers. Perhaps more companies can be made to realize that continuing to fund hateful racist, misogynistic and homophobic programming on the radio will lose them customers and money.

While this broadcast of the Rob, Arnie & Dawn in the Morning stands out as particularly egregious because the target for the abuse was children, how many of the same advertisers sponsor Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage and Glenn Beck, to name just a few? How uncomfortable can their advertisers be made?

It’s fundamentally a commercial system. But when we demonstrate that we won’t buy what the commercials are selling when they sponsor the continuation of on-air bigotry, maybe it won’t be so profitable.

Read more »

The Empty Hypocrisy of Protecting Children

You might have heard that the Supreme Court recently made a very narrow decision refusing to strike down the FCC’s enforcement of fleeting expletives on TV, such as when U2′s Bono dropped an f-bomb on a live Golden Globes broadcast a few years back. The justification always given for prohibiting so-called indecent words like “fuck” and “shit” on the broadcast airwaves between 6 AM and 10 PM is that we must protect the children from these horrible, brain-altering, growth-stunting, cancer-causing dirty words.

So what about the children who might have been listening to Sacramento, CA station KRXQ on May 28 when morning show hosts Rob Williams and Arnie States went on a hate-filled bigoted tirade against children who question their gender? Anyone, including children, tuning in would have heard that if States’ son ever put on high heels, he would beat him, saying

“If my son, God forbid, if my son put on a pair of high heels, I would probably hit him with one of my shoes. I would throw a shoe at him. Because you know what? Boys don’t wear high heels. And in my house, they definitely don’t wear high heels.”

States went on to advocate and encourage the humiliation and abuse that transgendered young people experience:

“You got a boy saying, ‘I wanna wear dresses.’ I’m going to look at him and go, ‘You know what? You’re a little idiot! You little dumbass! Look, you are a boy! Boys don’t wear dresses.’…

“You know, my favorite part about hearing these stories about the kids in high school, who the entire high school caters around, lets the boy wear the dress. I look forward to when they go out into society and society beats them down. And they end up in therapy.”

If you happened to be a young person or teenager hearing this, you might actually laugh, given the degree of uncertainty most young people feel about their sexuality and gender identity. It might also contribute to feeling justified in having disdain for other children who are gay or transgendered. And, unfortunately, it might also make you feel entitled to act violently towards someone whose sexual identity differs from yours, to hit a person with a shoe, or worse.

And what of the child who is questioning his or her own sexuality or gender who hears this? The message she or he will receive is that according to the show’s two most prominent hosts that child is a “freak” or “abnormal,” worthy of ridicule and deserving of violence. Given that suicide is a real pervasive problem amongst transgendered teens, this is a truly destructive message to broadcast at 9 AM in the morning.

In the reaction to this story I’ve read many people on social networks questioning how this station can keep its license. Of course the answer is simple: nothing legally qualifying as indecent was said on the program. Now, if Arnie States had said that he’d “throw a fucking shoe” at his son, or called transgendered children “fucking freaks,” well then a $15,000 fine would be on its way to KRXQ right now. That’s because that “fuck” would have destroyed the children listening in ways that the advocacy of violence and ridicule could never do, at least in the eyes of the FCC.

In the usual lame defense that comes from talentless, ignorant morning DJs, Arnie States said on air that “I know a lot of people don’t understand this…. That’s a joke.”

In the comment sections of Sacramento news sites the debate over this incident generally devolves into a shallow debate over supposed calls for free speech. Defenders of KRXQ and the hosts call detractors “politically correct” and lament that there’s no tolerance for free speech. Myself, I’m leery of having the FCC step in to regulate speech, also. Yet, the Commission already does step in to protect children from speech, but only if the speech is about fucking or shitting. Speech about beating up people who are different than you is A-OK, even if the people being rhetorically beat up are children.

The real issue is not free speech but the responsibility broadcasters have to local communities as the quid pro quo for having a monopoly over a particular frequency of the airwaves. Not everyone can have an FM station in Sacramento, and therefore KRXQ and Arnie States have a bully pulpit that still outclasses most people in Sac, even in this age of blogs, Twitter and podcasts. The real question is: is this the kind of broadcast the people of Sacramento would want if they actually had a choice or any control over what is broadcast over their airwaves?

As of now KRXQ only has to appeal to narrow demographic of white men 18-35 in order to satisfy its advertisers. So it panders to what it perceives that audience wants, regardless of what the rest of the community might want. It can continue to do this, and will suffer very little for these sorts of incidents because the station actually has nearly zero accountability to the people of Sacramento, due to the wholesale gutting of public service requirements for broadcast stations, combined with thirteen years of industry consolidation.

The likelihood of the FCC taking any sort of effective action against KRXQ for advocating violence against transgendered children is next to zero. I won’t be surprised if one or more commissioners chooses to speak out on the subject if the outrage reaches a louder volume. But don’t expect fines or any real jeopardy to the station’s license to be forthcoming. No, that jeopardy would require an assload of shits and fucks; nothing else will do.

However, because KRXQ panders to a particularly narrow audience in order to satisfy its advertisers, that’s where the station is most vulnerable, especially in this rotten ad climate. KRXQ boasts a large slate of both local and national advertisers, including such well known brands as Sonic Drive-Ins, Snapple, State Farm Insurance, Albertson’s, Carl’s Jr, Nissan, McDonalds and Wells Fargo. I wonder what they’re ad buyers would think about the station’s advocacy of violence towards children?

Sure, it’s not as effective as real local accountability. But hitting KRXQ and its owner Entercom in the pocketbook by haranguing their sponsors is at least one tactic that has a little promise. Another is to stop listening to KRXQ and all of Entercom’s stations in 23 different markets. And, then, let local advertisers know that you’re not listening, and why you’re not listening.

Such a boycott may or may not work, though I think it’s worth trying. However, this won’t be the last incident of this type so long as commercial radio continues its sprint to the bottom, both financially and ethically. The root cause of the promotion of this sort of ignorant, homophobic bigoted advocacy is greed, pure and simple, and the selective regulations that promote this kind of reductive, destructive greed.