Rightly or wrongly, Lennon’s girlfriend and later wife, Ono, has long been blamed for her influence over John Lennon and the subsequent disbanding of the band.
“Everything was going great,” they’ll say, “Until she showed up.”
In a sense, you could say the same about Janet Jackson and what’s happening today in Radio.
“Everything was going great until she showed up.”
There is no doubt that Jackson’s Superbowl stunt, where she exposed one of her breasts, was the final cultural outrage that put American Radio and TV companies under the gun by legislators, a portion of their constituents, and the F.C.C., the federal broadcast regulatory body that ultimately has to answer to Congress.
“Everything was going great,” Bubba The Love Sponge might be saying to himself, “Until she showed up.”
Sponge was fired by Clear Channel Communications on the heels of a record fine levied against his employer for content aired on his show in 2001. The pressure had slowly been building for a very long time. Radio (and TV) has continually pushed the boundaries with the language and content that could be broadcast without unbearable adverse ramifications.
And even when Howard Stern’s employer, Infinity, was fined $1.7 million dollars in 1995 for indecent content broadcast on his program, the Radio industry didn’t seem to mind too much because profits still outweighed fines and nobody seemed terribly worried that this action was anything more than an anomaly in the F.C.C.’s general treatment of broadcasters when it came to “indecent” content.
(Note: even though this record fine was handed down during the Clinton administration, Janet Jackson’s breast was still undercover. Besides, a lot more was being exposed in the corridors of the Oval Office than one measly breast.) So, Infinity just moved ahead, paid the fine, not terribly worried about what Stern might say next. It was just a cost of doing business.
Today, Stern says he’s a target of the more conservative Bush administration because his viewpoints are not in line with their conservative ideology. He’s predicting his show will soon be fined for some material from "...a three-year-old conversation...'' Stern said this week, I'm guessing that sometime next week will be my last show on this station....there's a cultural war going on. The religious right is winning. We're losing.''
Stern may be right or wrong, but, the fact remains: Janet Jackson’s breast has thrown two broadcast mediums into an extended anxiety attack and only history will demonstrate whether or not she was indeed, the "Yoko Ono of Radio".
If so, then one day, Howard Stern may be quoted as saying,
“Everything was going great until she showed up.”
