NPR Talk of the Nation

May 9, 2007

NPR’s Talk of the Nation
Post-Imus, Where Do Shock Jocks Draw the Line?

NEAL CONAN, host:

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I’m Neal Conan in Washington.

Radio is an intimate medium. Most of us listen while we’re alone. And in the privacy of our kitchens, cars and earbuds, millions of us enjoy listening to banter that might not pass muster in what used to be called polite company – raunchy and sometimes racial humor that pushes and sometimes crosses the line.

Shock jocks often portray themselves as rebels who stand up against censorship from the FCC and their own bosses. And from time to time the FCC will impose hefty fines, but as we learned from the Don Imus case, their bosses often encourage controversy and irreverence. They get ratings.

The former shock jock and CBS Radio will settle their dispute over what his contract said and what it meant in court. But a few weeks after he was fired, what’s changed? Where are the lines now?

The post-Imus world of shock jock radio. Has anything changed? Should it? 800-989-8255, 800-989-TALK, email is talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our blog; that’s at npr.org/blogofthenation.

With us is Marc Fisher, a columnist for the Washington Post, the author of “Something in the Air: Radio, Rock and the Revolution.” And he joins us here in Studio 3A. Nice to have you back on the program, Marc.

Mr. MARC FISHER (Columnist, Washington Post): Great to be with you, Neal.

CONAN: And I know that you’ve spoken with a few – use the term – shock jocks. What are some of the things they told you about their sense of responsibility and the way their world has changed?

Mr. FISHER: Well, their world has changed only a little bit, and it’s changed repeatedly when we have these kind of ritual purification exercises that take place after a little scandal. We saw this after the Janet Jackson breast reveal in the Super Bowl a few years ago, and quite a number of these shock jocks – particularly the ones on the FM raunch stations, the ones that call themselves hot talk – these are the stations where they have the morning shows where there’s a lot of talk about exotic sex acts and that sort thing. And a lot of those jocks were called in by their managers after that, just as they have been now after Don Imus, and told let’s cool it for a while; tone down the language, a few of the phrases that maybe pushed the envelop, reel those back in, and stop doing some of the call-in segments that you were doing, the strip shows, like some of them did.

Or they would have listener’s call in to describe various sex acts, so you don’t hear that for a time. But then they end up going right back there because as these DJs tell me again and again, this is what they are paid to do. They are there to build ratings. We are in a society where the further you – the harder you push that envelop, the higher the ratings will be.

Management knows that and management tries to thread, to kind of weave a path between the desire to have the content on the air be controversial and – so that listener’s will say, hey, did you hear what’s on this station – versus the desire to appeal to advertisers and assure them that they will not be put in the situation that Imus’ advertisers were put in.

So the management is very cautious about this and they will never talk on the record about it because they are really playing both sides of the coin. And the performers are caught knowing that the managers want them to be as controversial as you can be until the public reacts. And what’s new here is what Imus was trapped in, which is the YouTube trap, because what happened here is unlike – you know, radio is ephemeral. It goes out over the airwaves. If I hear something outrageous I might tell you about it.

CONAN: Right.

Mr. FISHER: But it doesn’t really become a big stink.

CONAN: We wait four years for the reviews from Alpha Centauri.

Mr. FISHER: Exactly. But TV and anything on video is now different because it gets immediately transferred to YouTube. Don Imus had the misfortune to have his radio show be simulcast on MSNBC, therefore there was video available of this moment, which was immediately posted on YouTube, and he was toast.

CONAN: And so it echoed and echoed and echoed and…

Mr. FISHER: I guess you have something you can latch on to it. It’s something visible.

CONAN: And is this some kind of a crossroad, or is this just another, as you say, episode of a ritual purification?

Mr. FISHER: Well, I think it’s just one more of these rituals but it is different in that you probably will now have the generation of managers of radio talk shows and stations who will say, you know what, we don’t want to do that simulcast with the TV station because it really does expose us to a lot more than we really want to be exposed to.

We’ll be back in just a moment. You’re listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

(Soundbite of music)

CONAN: This is TALK OF THE NATION. I’m Neal Conan in Washington.

Howard Stern, Don Imus. Those are names people recognize, but plenty of other shock jocks push and sometimes cross the line. Today we’re talking about talk radio post-Imus. With us, Marc Fisher of the Washington Post.

And of course you’re welcome to join the conversation. Has anything in radio changed since Imus was fired and should it? 800-989-8255. Email, talk@NPR.org, and you can read what other listeners have to say and submit your own comments on our blog at npr.org/blogofthenation. And let’s get Patrick on the line. Patrick is with us from Massachusetts.

PATRICK (Caller): Hi, thanks for taking my call.

CONAN: Sure.

PATRICK: I just – my comment is that I think Imus would have done a lot better forwarding, you know, the message if he was allowed to stay on air, you know, he should have been fined and suspended. But moving forward, you know, the discussion would have been brought forth more if he was involved in it. And you know, secondly, you know, besides NPR, “The Daily Report,” “The Colbert” – you know, “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report” – “Imus in the Morning” gave me a lot of news and a lot of good news. And it’s left huge void in my morning radio.

CONAN: Marc Fisher, I wonder what you think.

Mr. FISHER: Well, I think the role that the advertisers played was really a good deal larger than that. I think there is – especially in radio, as in newspapers or television, and all of these old media that are very much in decline right now and seeing the audiences dissipate, they don’t really see a clear way into the future, and so there’s an extra level of panic and of caution, and so when something like this blows up, these industries are especially susceptible to advertiser pressure. And that’s I think part of what happened here.

But the Imus program was especially susceptible to this because he uniquely mixed two worlds. He was, on the one hand, one of these FM hot talk, raunch radio jocks; on the other hand, he ran a…

CONAN: Though a lot of his stations were on AM.

Mr. FISHER: Exactly. And at the same moment, he ran a very highfalutin political talk program that drew the likes of Tim Russert and John McCain and many other big names from Washington. And it was that blend, that unique mixture that proved to be terribly toxic for Imus because he ended up being held to a higher standard than we hold almost all of the other so-called shock jocks on the radio from whom we expect this kind of nonsense and this kind of ugliness.

And the irony here is that there are literally hundreds of talk show hosts across the country who on a daily basis say things that are as bad or far worse, far uglier and nastier on the radio. They say it every morning and their audience is there for that reason, they expect that. Imus, because he was on a cable TV news operation that takes itself seriously and presents itself as a serious news operation, because of that he was caught when he crossed a line into extreme nastiness; he was held to the same standard that we might perhaps hold the politicians who are his guests.

CONAN: Okay. Patrick, thanks for the call.

PATRICK: You’re welcome. Thank you.

CONAN: So long.

Let’s go now with Ben, and Ben is with us from Westport in Massachusetts.

BEN (Caller): Yeah, I have question. I’m curious as to whether or not this whole incident reached such a crescendo because of the fact that the target – the recipients of this – the basketball team were, quote unquote, “innocent victims” as opposed to, for instance, a high profile politician or somebody who might be considered more fair game.

CONAN: Yeah, he’s said a lot of ugly things about Hillary Clinton, but Hillary Clinton can defend herself.

Mr. FISHER: Right.

Mr. BEN: And she doesn’t have a problem with it. Or was it more a fact that was it the semantics that he used? Had he said, nappy-headed young ladies, would this have been okay? Had he said African-American hos, would that have been okay? Was it the combination of the three words?

CONAN: I’m not sure any of us are quite qualified to parse the semantics that carefully, but…

Mr. FISHER: No, I don’t think it’s a matter of those individual words but I think your first point is exactly right. You know, there’s even a case in point happening just in recent days of Rush Limbaugh has been repeatedly airing a parody song which is a criticism of Barack Obama in which Barack Obama is called the Magic Negro.

And this is a song that goes on at some length to criticize Obama in a very racially tinged manner and there are certainly folks out there who don’t like the Rush Limbaugh program, who are trying to make an Imus kind of incident out of this, and they’re not getting any traction for exactly the reason that you mentioned.

This is – Imus really was a different kind of program from Limbaugh on the one hand, and also from the shock jocks on the other.

Mr. FISHER: We could have an endless argument about chicken or egg here, but I think there is history that teaches us that talk radio became raunchy and explicit not because the society had changed, but because of specific events that happened – the advent of satellite technology, the congressional and FCC decisions to lighten up on regulation of content on the radio, the elimination of the fairness doctrine.

That’s what opened the floodgates for a much more explicit kind of talk on the radio, both political and sexual. And before that, you had a much more benign kind of talk on the radio, perhaps a more boring kind of talk. But those are the events that changed the nature of talk radio. Yes, it’s true. We live in a much coarser society now than we once did, but there are areas of the media that do reflect that, and there are areas that don’t. Certainly, on satellite radio, you can hear every kind of curse word ever imagined.

CONAN: And every song Frank Sinatra ever recorded.

Mr. FISHER: Well, yes. Absolutely. But there are other aspects of the media, particularly that which is available to children during prime time, which have traditionally been held to a higher standard of language and of topics. And that’s the piece that we’ve kind of lost or at least been struggling with over the last decade. And we’re in this sort of pendulum that swings back and forth between allowing the extreme language and recoiling against it.

CONAN: We’re talking about talk radio post-Imus, with Marc Fisher of the Washington Post. And you’re listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

And let’s get Mel on the line. Mel’s with us from Winston-Salem in North Carolina. Hello, Mel? Are you there?

MEL (Caller): Thank you for taking my call.

CONAN: Sure.

MEL: I would just like to make a couple of statements, please.

CONAN: Go ahead.

MEL: First off, I think that a great amount of the popularity that these disc jockeys have is because they are saying things that the majority of people at one time or another actually think but never say. So when someone says something that people agree with privately, publicly, they’re going to be elevated in some people’s minds. Also, I’m of an age that I remember back when Imus first started on radio only, and from my recollection, Imus has always been in a certain vein, poking fun everything that come along – religion, whatever. And I just don’t think that the situation merited the outcome. That’s just my opinion.

CONAN: Mm-hmm. Well, certainly, the appeal of anybody on the radio is because they’re going to say things that people are interested in hearing, whatever that may be. And as I pointed out earlier, people do listen to radio in this little cone of privacy, Marc Fisher.

Mr. FISHER: Absolutely. There is an intimacy to radio that is unlike that of any other medium, and the caller is absolutely right. It is – there is a privacy, you know, in this conversation where the person on the radio is talking to you, and it feels like a one-on-one conversation. Add to that the privacy of the car – which is one of the last places where you can kind of be alone in this society – and the longer and longer times that people spend commuting to work, and you have – and also the change in the atmosphere in workplaces, where people are much more cautious about what they say than they may have been at a previous time.

CONAN: And rankle against it, which makes this kind of talk more appealing.

Mr. FISHER: Exactly. And so these talk show hosts become a kind of stand in for what many people would like to feel that they could say someday if they could ever say what was really on their minds at the office or at home or with their friends or in the neighborhood. And the car becomes that one place where it can all be vented. And so stations have found there’s an enormous ratings bonanza to be had if you get out there and say all the things that may be lurking in the minds of people – things that they might really never say, even if they did have that opportunity. So it is a kind of venting of the national id. And that’s a good thing, I think. I when we try to quash that and silence it, I think we are potentially doing damage, because people do need an outlet, even it’s not their own voice.

CONAN: Marc Fisher, a Washington Post columnist, author of “Something in the Air: Rock, Radio, and the Revolution”. He was with us here in Studio 3A. Thanks very much.

Mr. FISHER: Thank you.

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