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Howard Stern roars back - and bush is target
MARK LEPAGE
Freelance
The best secret in radio is that when Howard Stern is on a roll, when he focuses his cheap shots on a worthy target, he can be a vicious satirist.
For the most part though, Stern and his unerring radar for weakness are aimed on whatever pompous celebrity or striptease bunny happens by. His goals have not been lofty. It's not easy to aim high when you're dwarf-tossing.
It was an act that didn't play long in Montreal, where, from September 1997 to August 1998 he was on CHOM-FM. He was axed after the station bowed to pressure from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, which said he violated the industry's code.
But he's on a roll now - in New York. In ratings released Monday, Stern had the city's top morning show. He remains a force on 44 other stations across the United States. After months of semi-depressed crankiness after his bum's rush from the Clear Channel network, he is untanned, unrested, and in angry good form. The strippers and porn stars remain, but listeners are also tuning in for his politics.
Stern has refashioned the censorship issue into a cudgel to beat Bush. On his Web site, a poster called The Passion of the Stern celebrates his martyrdom. On the airwaves, he brags he will take down a president. Will he? And how did this happen?
After a month of scolding, fining and censuring, the Clear Channel broadcasting monolith finally booted Stern from its radio network in February. Effectively, Stern was evicted from middle America. Stern had been targeted after Janet Jackson's Super Bowl incident, when a caller to his show used the N-word and eluded the bleep delay. He immediately seized on the issue, claiming he was a victim of the Breast that Smothered Free Speech. And then for two weeks in March, Stern's morning show on K-Rock 92.3 FM was the House of Gloom, with the host wallowing in self-pity like the stars he savages.
He moaned, predicting he'd be taken off the air. The show teetered as its host flailed. Then he rallied, lashing out at his perceived tormenters.
In late March, he even tried to drag Queen Oprah into the mess. In a newspaper story headlined Stern: Oprah Talks Dirtier, he accused the FCC of hypocrisy after a writer from O magazine explained on television the sexual activities of U.S. teenagers, bluntly describing oral and anal sex acts. That's practically the Stern manifesto; so why can't he get dirty?
It's no surprise to hear Stern play the free speech martyr: It's his default setting when the airwave censors go through a cyclical spasm of "What is this trash?" However, you could almost hear the wheels grinding a political manifesto into shape.
And from a spirit of almost total self-interest, Stern has emerged as the funniest and most tenacious critic of the Bush presidency working in any medium.
He is an erratic critic. He attacks when it suits him. But he barged into a context of tentative criticism and immediately became its loudest and rudest voice.
In a small sampling, New Yorkers were split on Stern's potential election leverage.
Dave, an actor and playwright, said, "I don't think he's taken seriously enough to have that effect. And I don't know what kind of saviour he thinks Kerry is gonna be."
Emily Fleischer, a TV producer, noted, "There are people calling in with political opinions who I would venture to say have never had an opinion before."
Those people are men in their 20s; and let's consider the numbers, which make Stern an unwelcome enemy.
When it comes to fines, Howard Stern is a one-man gang. This spring, the FCC had to break its own rules, citing him for each violation instead of laying down one fine for the entire show. That meant 18 tickets worth $27,500 each. A group called the Centre for Public Integrity estimates of the $4 million in fines issued by the FCC since 1990, Howard Stern tallied half.
His employer, Infinity Broadcasting, paid them. Howard Stern has a vast, young, male listenership in the millions, an audience much coveted by advertisers. Howard Stern was worth the trouble.
How interesting, then, to hear Stern on recent mornings, showering them not just with twin-sister lesbian pudding wrestling, but with rants against the White House, the Iraq war, the invisible vice-president.
Recently, he's mocked U.S. Attorney-General John Ashcroft, who "can't catch Osama" but can arrest '60s survivor Tommy Chong on trumped-up drug charges. Next to a list of "Anti-Bush Web sites," the FCC logo has been replaced by a swastika. Between these, dozens of politicized links to stories about Bush, Haliburton, Iraq. There have been links such as "Fellowship Finances Townhouse Where Six Congressmen Live - See Who & How They Voted" and a T-shirt campaign - "SAVE STERN Censorship Is Obscene."
Is it a movement? Consider this: Stern has solidified his audience hold in electoral "swing states" Florida and Pennsylvania, along with other battlegrounds Michigan, Ohio and Missouri. His 8.2 million weekly listeners are swing voters, all right - they swing from the rafters, they swing for the fences, they swing at passersby ...
But if even a small percentage of that audience is galvanized to vote, perhaps for the first time, who knows what could happen? An eye-opening poll commissioned by Democrats revealed some interesting characteristics of the Stern Listener (more conservative, better educated than you think). Stern had said: "My listeners will vote in a bloc."
Stern fans in 18 battleground states now prefer Kerry to Bush by 59 per cent to 37 per cent. Bush took Missouri by 78,786 votes, which may seem large but was a winning percentage of only 3.34 per cent. He won New Hampshire by 7,211 votes. He officially won Florida by 537.
In the meantime, Howard Stern's muzzling has wired some lightning through his show. On a recent Wednesday morning in the pre-sweeps quarter, Stern had three of the women from The Apprentice - Kristy, Katrina and Ereka - in studio, for two sides of Howard.
"Do you realize we are in an incredible time?" he asked. "When have you ever seen a disc jockey fight the government?"
They had never seen it before. And then:
"Do any of you girls wanna defy the government by having sex with me right now?"
They did not.
On the Net: Howard Stern's Web site: www.howardstern.com
John Kerry's Web site: www.johnkerry.com
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