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Howard Stern having impact with crusade against Bush

By Steven Thomma, Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Forget Al Franken. Democrats have a new champion on talk radio that they hope will counter the likes of conservative icons Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. It's shock jock Howard Stern.

Known more for crude talk of sex and lewd acts than politics or public policy, Stern has launched an on-air crusade he calls a "jihad" to defeat President Bush. He blames Bush for a government crackdown on his use of obscenity on the air.

And he's having an impact, apparently boosting the prospects of Sen. John Kerry, D- Mass., according to a new Democratic poll released Thursday. That was welcome news to Democrats who've long ached for a liberal voice on talk radio and have watched in frustration as former comic Franken has struggled with a new program that has limited airplay.

"Howard Stern is the most influential political talk-show host in America today," said Michael Harrison, the editor of Talkers magazine, which covers the talk-radio industry.

Stern is going after Bush with near-obsessive zeal, a notable development in a medium in which 20 of the top 27 talk-show hosts are conservatives, including the top-rated Limbaugh and Hannity.

Stern's Web site preaches the virtues of freedom of speech and includes or links to numerous articles, sometimes obscene ones, criticizing or ridiculing Bush. On the air, he spends more and more time urging his listeners to vote against Bush.

"I'm asking you to do me one favor: Vote against Bush," he said on one recent program. "I call on all fans of the show to vote against Bush," he said on another. "We're going to deliver the White House to John Kerry."

Stern has dabbled in New York-area politics before, endorsing Republican Christine Todd Whitman when she ran for governor of New Jersey in 1993 and Republican George Pataki when he ran for governor of New York in 1994. Both won, and a grateful Whitman named a highway rest stop after Stern, as he'd requested. But Stern's new commitment is national in scope.

His anti-Bush crusade stems from the Federal Communications Commission's efforts to combat indecency on the public airwaves. The FCC recently fined radio station owner Clear Channel Communications a record $1.75 million for airing some Stern comments that the FCC deemed offensive. Stern objects that the FCC is censoring his right to free speech. Clear Channel pulled him off its six stations that aired him, though he remains on the air on 36 other stations nationwide.

It's that audience that could make Stern's campaign so important.

He has an estimated 8.5 million listeners each week, third after the 14.5 million who listen to Limbaugh and the 12 million who listen to Hannity, according to Talkers magazine.

But Limbaugh and Hannity devote their programs almost entirely to politics and policy. Their audiences are already interested in politics, and decidedly conservative. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center, for example, found that 77 percent of Limbaugh's listeners were conservative, 16 percent were moderate and 7 percent were liberal.

Stern's listeners are less interested in politics and more likely to be undecided, and thus are better prospects to be persuaded one way or the other, Harrison said.

"The Hannity/Limbaugh audience already knows where it's going," he said. "The Stern audience is fertile ground."

Stern's listeners are older and more affluent than some might think, having aged with the 50-year-old star. "It's a myth that young people listen to Stern," Harrison said. "He's an old guy to them. Their world is far raunchier, far edgier than anything Howard Stern does. They live in the world of the Internet, of porn sites."

It's not just Stern's listeners who could be swayed to vote against Bush. When Clear Channel pulled the plug on Stern, it took him off the air in two cities in Florida, leaving untold numbers of irate fans in a state where the last presidential election was decided by 537 votes.

Nationwide, 17 percent of likely voters listen to Stern's radio show, according to the poll released Thursday by the New Democrat Network, a Washington-based group. They favor Kerry over Bush by 53 percent to 43 percent, and by 59 to 37 percent in 18 battleground states.

Of the likely voters who listen to Stern, 1 out of 4 is a swing voter who hasn't decided how to vote in November. That means that about 4 percent of the national swing vote up for grabs this fall listens to Stern, according to the poll.

"You're now seeing a guy who has phenomenal reach of swing voters and a huge percentage of people who are going to be critical voters in the election spending all of his day every day going after the president," said Simon Rosenberg, the president of the New Democrat Network.

"Rush Limbaugh has met his match."

from the  NY Times
June 9, 2004

Clear Channel Is Said to Settle Accusations of Indecency

Clear Channel Communications, one of the nation's largest owners of radio stations, has reached an agreement with the Federal Communications Commission to pay more than $1.7 million in penalties to settle a series of indecency complaints, three people briefed on the negotiations said last night.

Barring a last-minute breakdown, the total fine that Clear Channel has agreed to pay - an estimated $1.75 million - would represent the largest ever negotiated between a broadcaster and the commission.

The largest penalty previously secured by the commission against a broadcaster involved Infinity Broadcasting, which agreed in 1995 to pay $1.7 million to the commission to settle complaints against Howard Stern.

Clear Channel's agreement with the F.C.C. also involves, in part, Mr. Stern's actions on the airwaves. The company is expected to admit that some of the material that it broadcast on its stations - including several segments of a Stern radio show during which anal sex was discussed - was indecent, according to one person close to the negotiations. That admission could prove a problem for Infinity, a unit of Viacom. The company has maintained that however offensive Mr. Stern's comments may be to some people, they do not meet the legal definition of indecent speech, and are thus protected by the First Amendment.

The agreement between Clear Channel and the commission would in effect settle any listener complaints made against its stations. Among the complaints are those concerning a 20-minute segment of the Stern show, much of it about anal sex, that Clear Channel broadcast last year on six of its stations; in April, the commission proposed fining the company $495,000 over that segment. (At the time, commission officials said that they had begun to examine whether it should penalize Infinity, which is Mr. Stern's employer and which broadcast the same segment on 18 of its stations.) The agreement also covers other listener complaints against Clear Channel, many of them yet to be made public by the commission. For Clear Channel - which suspended Mr. Stern's show on its stations in February and stopped carrying it permanently in April - the agreement represents an opportunity for political, as well as financial, finality on the issue, in an election year in which Janet Jackson's Super Bowl breast-baring has pushed such matters to the fore.

The proposed $1.75 million in fines would be on top of the $755,000 penalty that Clear Channel agreed to pay in March because of graphic and sexually explicit material broadcast in Florida on the "Bubba the Love Sponge" program, whose host, Todd Clem, has since been dismissed.

For the commission, and its chairman, Michael K. Powell, the agreement represents something of a trophy. Not only would the fines be the highest in F.C.C. history, but Clear Channel would admit that it had broadcast indecent material.

Clear Channel has also pledged not to go to court to challenge any of the complaints - including those that Clear Channel believes involved material that would not meet the legal definition of indecency.

A Clear Channel spokeswoman, Lisa Dollinger, did not respond to a message left last night seeking comment. A spokesman for Mr. Powell, David Fiske, declined to comment.

The agreement between Clear Channel and the commission, which could be announced as soon as this week, comes as the F.C.C. has been taking a more aggressive posture toward curbing sexual content and profanity on the nation's airwaves.

In March, the commission reversed an earlier ruling and found that NBC had violated decency standards by broadcasting a single vulgarity uttered by Bono, the lead singer of U2. That occurred while he was accepting an award during the Golden Globes ceremony in 2003.

Congress has also sought to be heard on the overall issue.

In March, the House of Representatives, by an overwhelming margin, passed a bill that would toughen the penalties for broadcasting material deemed to be indecent. A similar bill that includes a provision that would seek to rein in violence on television has been approved by the Senate Commerce Committee, though it has not yet been scheduled for discussion by the full Senate.

In the midst of the government's stepped-up interest in the decency issue, some producers and civil rights advocates have complained that the pendulum of what broadcasters consider appropriate has swung too far in the direction of self-censorship.

This year, for example, an Indianapolis radio station owned by Emmis Communications used its so-called "dump button" - an electronic delay device - to pre-empt the words "urinate," "damn" and "orgy" from being heard by listeners during its broadcast of Rush Limbaugh's radio show.

Jun 3, 2004

Viacom Looks to Sell Weak Radio Stations-Redstone

Viacom has already begun identifying which stations to sell under its Infinity umbrella, Redstone told investors at a conference organized by Sanford C. Bernstein in New York. He did not elaborate on how many stations would be sold.

"We probably will sell some of those stations to others, who are more avaricious about radio than we are," said Redstone, who reiterated a commitment to not sell Infinity.

The company's commitment to revamp its radio unit comes just two days after veteran radio executive Mel Karmazin abruptly resigned as Viacom president and chief operating officer after an uncomfortable tenure under Redstone.

Redstone said he expected that Infinity would show operating improvements through the year. "Radio is growing, but not as fast as we would like," he said. But it is "certainly not the business it was when Mel was king of that business."

New York-based Viacom, which owns the CBS television network, MTV and the Paramount movie studio, also plans to seek out potential cable channels to buy, but does not see any major deals in sight, Redstone said.

Redstone also said he planned to back controversial radio host, Howard Stern, who has lamented the loss of Karmazin, his biggest supporter.

"We'll give him the support," Redstone said. "I believe he will stay with us."

Separately, Redstone shot down speculation Viacom was looking to break into the video games business. He said Viacom once looked at leading game publisher, Electronic Arts Inc., but its current stock price made an acquisition too expensive.

Viacom's widely traded Class B shares closed the day up 38 cents to $37.18 on the New York Stock Exchange. Electronic Arts ended 79 cents higher at $51.36 on Nasdaq.

June 3, 2004

Stern Not Likely To Jump Ship Immediately

Karmazin, however, is urging Stern and Viacom to make peace with each other. "Howard is a very important profit contributor to Viacom," Karmazin reportedly told the Wall Street Journal. "Hopefully, Viacom will continue to support him, because he is clearly not broadcasting indecency."

"Howard made Mel rich, and Mel made Howard rich, and there is a loyalty there, and Mel has been a very staunch defender of Howard," Jon Mandel, co-chief executive of Grey Global Group Inc.'s MediaCom, told the Journal. "I hope Howard sticks around. It would be bad for the industry, it would be bad for radio and it would be bad for the fight against censorship if Howard decided to just throw a howling hissy fit."

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