Howard Stern Was Original Face of FCC Persecution
When shock jock Howard Stern left his enormously successful radio job for the burgeoning days of Sirius in 2005, he claimed the reason wasn’t the $40 million a year he’d be putting in his pocket. “The driving force,” he wrote in his memoir Howard Stern Comes Again, “was getting away from the FCC.”
Boy, did the FCC hate Stern, even more than it appears to have it out for the current crop of late-night hosts. To be fair, Stern taunted the agency at every turn, dishing out steamy piles of scatological, racial and sexual humor to grab listeners. In the 1990s, there just weren’t a lot of radio shows doing “Bestiality Dial-a-Date.”
Between 1990 and Stern’s departure from terrestrial radio, the FCC continually brought the hammer down on the King of All Media. Stern got scolded for “dwelling on sexual and excretory matters in a way that was patently offensive.” He was slapped for a Christmas show that featured a man playing the piano with his penis and women being hypnotized into orgasm. He got fines for talking about masturbating to a picture of Aunt Jemima.
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Stern responded with public rallies, shouting defiant slogans to raucous listeners who showed up for the anti-censorship parties. “The FCC wants to clean up the show? Go ahead, let them try!” he shouted. “I’m going to continue to do what I do.”
The fines kept coming, some advertisers pulled their support and Stern delivered huge ratings while jumping from one market to another. The FCC eventually dealt out more than $2.5 million in penalties, along with threats to pull the broadcasting licenses of the companies that aired Stern’s show. The FCC also delayed Infinity Broadcasting’s purchase of radio stations while it sorted out the Stern mess.
The accumulation of penalties made it nearly impossible for Stern to do his radio show without neutering his trademark, boundary-pushing humor. He left for Sirius, but not before calling into a talk show with FCC Chairman Michael Powell to offer parting words. “I don’t think that you personally hate me,” Stern told Powell. “I think what you’ve been doing is dangerous to free speech. I don’t think it’s just against me, I think things have gotten way out of control.”
No one knows better than Stern what Jimmy Kimmel has faced in recent weeks, albeit under different circumstances. “He’s one of the few people I can really turn to when I need advice, because he’s been through all of this stuff and then some,” Kimmel told Rolling Stone earlier this year.
In Howard Stern Comes Again, Stern wondered aloud about what would have happened if he hadn’t fallen out with Donald Trump, once a frequent guest on his Sirius shows. “Had I endorsed him for president, publicly hitched myself to his candidacy and gone all in, who knows what might have come from it,” Stern wrote. “Maybe I’d be chairman of the FCC, in charge of the government branch that tried to put me out of business. Think of the cosmic irony in that.”
