“GEE, BRAIN, WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO TONIGHT?”

FROM STEM TO STERN

Glenn Reynolds opines about Clear Channel dropping Howard Stern’s show:

It’s hard for me to get too exercised about this. I’m opposed to censorship, but Stern was “censored” by his employer. I’m capable of getting exercised about such things, sometimes, but not this time. And if Rush Limbaugh had been canned over the kind of racial comments Stern made, and allowed on the air, nobody would be crying “censorship.” Instead they’d be saying that it showed the inherent racism of his show and his audience.

Well?

it: This whole mess shows the basic boorishness of Stern’s audience. Just like the Opie and Anthony incident showed the basic boorishness of their audience. You can fault Stern, O&A, Mancow, et al., for pandering to the basest instincts of the basest among us, but the fact remains, they only do so because it always works. Talking in the basest and vilest sexual and racial terms always draws a huge audience.

For years, Howard Stern has been an actor playing the part of “Howard Stern,” a prominent New York radio personality whose persona is essentially a caricature of the jerkiness inherent in many people. There’s a long, sad history of people attempting to poke fun at the lowest common denominator and failing miserably, because the lowest common denominator turned out to be even lower than they had imagined. This goes back at least as far as Archie Bunker, with stops along the way at David Bowie’s Thin White Duke, “Beavis and Butt-Head” (idolized by the very audience it was intended to mock), Homer Simpson, and even Marilyn Manson (Brian Warner has publicily admitted that “Marilyn” is a character he plays). All of these characters were conceived as commentaries on undesirable attributes; all of them wound up being embraced for their inherent wrongness.

“Howard Stern” is just another example of this, and he’s just the latest to become a joke that isn’t particularly funny anymore. There’s almost certainly some political motivation behind the timing of ClearChannel’s actions–but you could also say that they’re just trying to stay ahead of the curve and let Stern go out like Barry Sanders, instead of Michael Jordan.