260: The Facts Don’t Matter
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From the BB EZ Chicago, it's this American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. I give up. I mean, I want to leave the radio. The government is closing in on me. They've already won. They've got these broadcasters in such a snit that they're hitting buttons on me. Biring people. Like a lot of you, I switch back and forth between Howard Stern and Morning Edition every morning. The Howard Stern NPR crossover audience exists everywhere, here in Chicago, it's 10,000 people a day, an equal number of men and women, average age in the 40s, good incomes. And in the last two weeks, as Congress has moved forward with bills raising FCC fines from tiny to a half million dollars each, Howard has been kicked off six stations by the conglomerate Clear Channel. And Howard has told his audience that because of the fines, he might be off the rest of his stations soon. And how you see all this really depends on how you frame the issue. Howard Stern frames it as a simple First Amendment issue. He's not going too far. The government's going too far. In the news media, the story has often been framed as a kind of wacky news. There goes that crazy Howard Stern running his mouth again, getting in trouble. Maybe there's some theoretical First Amendment issue here, but this guy, in this guy's case, he definitely goes too far. He's crazy. I have to say, this seems like the least useful way to view this story. For one thing, it's just weirdly condescending. For some reason, lots of people get this strange condescending tone when they talk about Howard Stern. And most important, it sidesteps the bigger issue, which is that, for better or worse, what we're witnessing here is a real sea change in how government is regulating radio and television, making it much easier to revoke stations licenses for indecency, finding the actual people in the air up to a half million dollars. You may like that, you may not like that, but let's acknowledge what it is and talk about it like adults. It'll change the environment even for what we do here on this American life. One of our contributors, Sandra Tenglo, maybe some of you have heard about this in the media already, has already been fired from the public radio station that used to run her comments every week under a so-called zero tolerance policy. This is a big change, though, um, fascinatingly, again, it all comes down to how you frame what the issue is, when I talk to the head of the congressional committee that's behind the fines, this is Fred Upton of Michigan, the congressman, he framed the whole thing much differently. He downplayed all of this. He said it is much simpler, it is much smaller, and at his heart, it's completely uncontroversial, the way that he frames it. This is actually one of the arguments that got the new fines approved by the House overwhelmingly, 391 to 22. That argument is, Congress isn't doing anything fancy or radical here.
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