Tuesday, Mar. 16, 2004
These are tough times out there in the vast radio wasteland, what with the FCC threatening Serious and Longterm consequences for on-air personalities who take their rules of propriety in vain. For those of you scoring at home, here's a rogue’s gallery of radio personalities recently dropped for on-air obscenity: Howard Stern, Bubba the Love Sponge and Sandra Tsing Loh.
Who? Allow me to introduce myself. I’m a public radio commentator, a 42 year-old mini-van driving mother of two. At the time of my firing — and I realize this may sound like a joke, a Saturday Night Live caricature of the nervous, twittering ladies of NPR but here goes . . . When fired for obscenity I was in the middle of a five-part series on knitting. The kind of you do with yarn.
We live in surreal times, when fear of the FCC and fear of fear of the FCC swirl together to create a Perfect Media Storm. That's how a local commentator fired from a $150-a-week job can suddenly make Variety, NBC news, the Drudge Report, Reuters, the BBC, even the crawl on CNN Headline News: "RADIO COMMENTATOR SANDRA TSING LOH FIRED FOR OBSCENITY." My supporters range from The National Review to Howard Stern. I don’t know whether my next invitation will be to the White House or to Larry Flynt’s. And then there’s the passionate outpouring of hundreds of e-mails on my behalf. I feel like Howard Dean without the vision. . . or the scream.
more.................
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,601645,00.html