Dennis Miller should have married Brynn Hartman

I got a link the other day, showing a recent talk show hosted by Dennis Miller. It was an interview with author Eric Alterman. Alterman’s written a pretty well-researched book called “What Liberal Media?”, in which he points out the rather obvious fact that the mainstream media is far from liberal. For all his trouble, he somehow got on the Dennis Miller show.

In the video, the guy on the left (Alterman) is presenting cogent arguments and facts. The guy on the right (Miller) is making fun of cogent guy’s face. Maybe Dennis should just interview Ann Coulter every night of the week. Take a look at the video link to see the Radical Right’s current poster child at work, employing every tool in his arsenal to elegantly prove his point. The audience is nothing but fawning as he acts like a big baby.

I’d gladly trade Dennis to have Phil back. The Simpsons just haven’t been the same without him.

Anyway … this guy (Miller) gets to stay on TV. This guy’s not indecent at all. Not like the real problem with America. That tall guy that the government’s been after for years. It’s not Osama — it’s Howard Stern.

The Clear Channel Controversy, One Year On (BuzzFlash) is a detailed look at how your entertainment choices are made for you by large, Christian, far-right media organizations and the FCC, an unelected government body ostensibly charged with protecting the public’s right to media choice, but which, headed by the Secratary of State’s son, Michael Powell, is shoveling the airwaves into corporate hands as fast as it can.

Ever since Janet showed us 2 pixels of a metal-encased nipple, the far-right government has been on a ‘decency’ jihad of sorts. Of course, with the pressing, urgent need to clean up the airwaves for the children, we can’t be troubled with defining what ‘indecent’ is legally. We’ve never been able to pin that down in a satisfactory way, so let’s just skip that step and just axe everything that annoys the rich and powerful. I’m sure whatever they decide will also be in our best interests.

So what is this decency thing? It’s legislation that has obviously been waiting for a “tipping-point” moment like this for a while. It’s a point at which enough people will shame themselves into believing that we need the government to protect us from indecent entertainment. The little on/off switch is not enough. The channel clicker is not enough. We want to make sure nobody gets to see this stuff. Come on, America! (Something Awful), appearing on a site not really known for its spot-on reporting, had an uncharacteristic appeal to sanity at the end of one article:

“… [t]he House recently passed a bill that would increase indecen[c]y fines to $500,000 per incident and enable the FCC to fine individual performers as well. The problem with this bill is that the FCC has yet to define what is specifically indecent. Worse than that is when a company or performer wants to go to court over the fine the FCC will make it hard for that company or performer to do business by blocking license renewals or station purchases. That is exactly what they did to Infinity Radio when they were fined for 1.7 million dollars in 1995. This bill gives enormous power to an organization that answers to no one, whose chairman is not elected but appointed by the President of the United States. The bill passed with a vote of 391 to 22. Don’t let 391 men and women tell millions of people what they can and can’t listen to. This is a representative democracy and the millions of people who love this so-called “ind[e]cent programming” are not being represented. Tell congress how you feel about this by writing to your senator or congressman. If you don’t the programs you love may be fined out of existance. You probably won’t and that’s a shame. But when they start coming for your favorite shows don’t say nobody warned you.”

Let’s take a look at a couple of cases of the kind of outrageous behavior this bill might be trying to prevent:

“…disc jockey Bill Handel aired a skit in which make-believe Muslims made several racist and offensive remarks, including claims that Muslims engage in sex with animals and are obsessed with killing Jews.”

That doesn’t really sound like informed political commentary of any kind. It’s pretty much hate speech (though, in that case, Rush should have been tossed years ago for the aural poison he’s been serving). Other DJs have actually already been fined and removed under the new, more restrictive rules:

“…those who raised questions about the war in Iraq (or about the President) soon felt censorship’s sting — with several disc jockeys making a connection between their anti-war or anti-Bush stance and their eventual fate.”

That might be sour grapes of sorts, but there is one famous disc jockey who recently got axed under the new decency law — a disc jockey who has done everything one his radio show in the last decade and always managed to defend himself with the First Amendment. Until now.

“As soon as I came out against Bush, that’s when my rights to free speech were taken away. It had nothing to do with indecency,“ Howard Stern said on March 19, 2004. … But, as Reuters reported, “A representative of Clear Channel, which dumped top-rated talk-show host Howard Stern in February under a new “zero tolerance” policy toward indecency, had no immediate comment.“”

So Clear Channel dumped Stern under the decency law, but has no comment on exactly why. He’s just gone. And gone specifically from Florida, where his influence might well have affected his market’s voting decisions if he kept up his anti-Bush stance until the election. So, Stern, heretofore unbreakable, no matter how many lesbians he put together on the air, is gone — and only after he started bad-mouthing the government, but:

“…as far as we know, Handel is still happily broadcasting over Clear Channel’s airways — as is Michael Savage who told a “sodomite” caller to his now canceled MSNBC show, “You should only get AIDs and die, you pig.”

I’m glad to see the airwaves are in the capable hands of the FCC and Clear Channel. It really feels like the public’s right to be informed is being well served.

As with most things, whether Stern is against Bush out of actual conviction or out of spite is not really known. Could A Stern Reprimand Send Dubya Home To Texas? (Plastic) examines whether Stern has enough market power to sway the election. In the comments, there were discussions of whether he was an ABB-er or not.

“Most of his “Get Bush out” commentary has been followed by “Not that Kerry will be much better” and “Why isn’t anyone else defending me?” If the Democrats continue to take Stern for granted, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he throws his weight behind Nader or whomever the Libertarians are nominating this year. He’s pissed, but he will turn on you in a heartbeat if he feels he’s being used.”

I would be delighted if Howard Stern was smart enough to see that Kerry isn’t going to help keep the airwaves free either. He’s probably taking just as much campaign money from Clear Channel as Bush. That’s the beauty for corporations today — it’s relatively cheap to just play both sides and get control no matter which side wins.

If Stern came out for Nader, he wouldn’t last a second, but he’d gain my respect. He’s off the air in sensitive political markets now, but he still makes money for Clear Channel. If he started supporting an anti-corporate candidate, advertisers would flee and he’d be gone.

But imagine a different, perhaps cooler scenario — imagine if even more people started listening.

Then advertisers would be begging to get airtime during his show so he could diss capitalism. Check out The Perfect Storm That’s About to Hit by Jeremy Rifkin (Common Dreams) to see the end towards which capitalism is careening. A weakening dollar (“[t]he euro is currently valued at $1.23”) and soaring gas prices this summer, when “gasoline could climb as high as $3.50 a gallon”, could stall the pathetic US recovery (which is still contained solely to corporate profit, not actual jobs) and because of “America’s growing debt … threaten the financial stability of the world economy”

But I digress — it’s putting too much confidence in Stern’s acumen to believe he either knows or cares about such things. As another comment at Plastic points out:

“Back then [Fall 2001], he [Stern] considered Bush’s policies as most appropriate. Now that the same policies and mind-set are coming to bite him on his ass, he turns virulently anti-Bush?

“I do not doubt that Stern is a very intelligent man … [b]ut does he really think his audience does not see his double standards? What would happen if the government suddenly dropped its plans to restore decency in the media? Would Howard go back to supporting this administration?”

So maybe Stern isn’t exactly the poster-child campaigner for freer, saner, actually-democratic, political system in America. Neither is Nader, really (he’s not very inspiring for people who have trouble with sound-bites that last longer than 10 seconds). But you’ve got to start somewhere; beggars can’t be choosers.