Just curious about what the FCC does and does not allow re “hate speech”.
Lets say that a closet white power sympathizer somehow managed to buy a radio station that mainly played music, but had a call in show in the afternoon, and the owner decides to hire a white power morning DJ.
As long as a disk jockey did not use sexual epithets or scatalogical curse words, could they be utterly racist and use words like “nigger, spic, kike”, etc, under current FCC guidelines if the radio station let him get away with it? Could the station get their license pulled for this?
The station could probably get its license pulled.
The FCC’s offensive-language rules aren’t a static list. “Let’s see, Mr. DJ, you said ‘shit’ four times and ‘fuck’ six times, but since ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’ aren’t on the list, you’re OK for those.” If a station broadcasts material that is offensive, the FCC is well within its scope to investigate and take appropriate action. Language also applies to the lyrical content of songs; if a song uses offensive language, the station is liable.
In this climate, the FCC is a lot more conservative about what it will and won’t allow on the air. With a black chairman, it’s hard to see that it would let racist content slide.
Don’t have a cite, but I can tell you that it’s routine for the Stern show to run phone messages from a klan member, full of racial epithets. The same Klan stooge sometimes appears in person spouting the same garbage. It works for Stern because it allows him to have it both ways - he can make fun of the angry hillbilly in the white hood and at the same time violate the social taboo against racial epithets.
It’s discussion of sexually explicit and scatological topics that’s put Stern in trouble with the FCC. Oddly enough, Tom Leykis was discussing this on his afternoon radio show just yesterday. He said that he could say nigger, kike, whop, spic etc. as much as he wanted, he just couldn’t talk explicitly about sex.
Leykis is one the most knowledgable people in the country on the radio business, in addition to being the top talk radio guy in the country after Stern and Limbaugh. He’s built his enormous listenership by knowing exactly what he could get away with saying and what he couldn’t. IMHO, he realized that the number of men who hate women (while simultaneously lusting after them) was much larger than the number of whites who hate minorities.
The danger in using racial epithets against minorities is that minority organizations can launch protests and boycotts, and scare off advertisers. You may recall that the Greaseman was booted off DC 101 years ago for joking about the King assasination “kill four more and we’ll get the whole week off”. Bob Grant lost his job at NYC’s WABC for joking about the plane crash death of a black
Clinton administration member. It seems to be advocacy of killing or other violence against minorities that crosses the line causes real firestorms.
Leykis woman hating schtick doesn’t seem to draw the same response, or at least it hasn’t so far. Perhaps women don’t feel quite as threatened by it as minority groups do.
The situation is different in Canada. You can be kicked off the air there for “inciting racial hatred”. I believe Stern was banned from Canadian radio stations when he described French Canadians as scum during a general anti-French rant (Stern is too stupid to tell the difference between French Canadians and the French, not that diatribes against them are any better).
Bottom line: racial hatred is OK, but sex isn’t. In a sense, this is a variation on the classic American approach of tolerating media violence while prohibiting media sex.
There was a radio station, I believe, in a small town in Colorado, that was basically “all hate all the time.” I think the FCC finally was able to pull its license, not over program content, but multiple violations of other rules and regulations. Sort of like getting Al Capone for tax fraud.
I think if they’d crossed their T’s and dotted their I’s they’d probably still be around.