STERN CATEGORIES
To the guffaws of critics, the FCC has ruled that Howard Stern's radio show is a news interview program for regulatory purposes. The decision means that Stern can interview Arnold Schwarzenegger without giving equal time to the 134 other candidates for California governor. The decision affects only Stern. Late-night comedians, from whom some voters get political news (9 percent, the same as C-SPAN, in the the Pew Center's survey on the 2000 election), are still out of luck. In an August 30 NYT op-ed, Craig Kilbourn of CBS's Late, Late Show explained how the "equal time" rule affects his program:
Last Wednesday night, 10 minutes before we were to go on the air, a group of CBS lawyers demanded that we cut that night's comedy segment -- a satire of a speech by Gov. Gray Davis, Arnold Schwarzenegger's first political advertisement and the campaign of the porn actress (she's been downgraded from porn star) Mary Carey, all of which included images of the candidates.
This was shocking. First, because the lawyers finally conceded that our show contains comedy; second, because it was the first time I'd heard that the Federal Communication Commission's equal time rule -- which requires radio and television stations to grant equal time to all candidates -- might apply to our show. The lawyers told us that between now and Oct. 7, the date of the California recall election, we cannot show a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger unless we are prepared to show pictures of all 135 candidates. And I can tell you from experience, the audience tends to tune out after the 81st one.
Appealing to journalists' vanity, Andrew Schwartzman, president of the leftist Media Access Project, condemned the FCC's Stern decision, telling the NYT that "Howard Stern isn't 'bona fide' anything" and that the decision "mocks that system by equating Howard Stern with Tim Russert." To the WaPost, he was a bit blunter about his desire for censorship:
"What this means is that every 'morning zoo' disc jockey whose brother-in-law is running for city council can put him on the air without worrying about giving equal time to anyone else," said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, a communications lawyer who heads the Media Access Project in Washington. "They've removed the notion that a bona fide news interview show is supposed to apply to journalists. If Howard Stern is a real journalist, real journalists should be upset."
God forbid that people get their "news and information" (as the local news shows put it) from sources other than government-certified journalists. This contempt for unorthodox sources is particularly disingenuous coming from a man whose organization supposedly "promotes the public's First Amendment right to hear and be heard on the electronic media of today and tomorrow."
The very silliness of having to declare Howard Stern a journalist reveals how ridiculous and antithetical to the free flow of ideas our broadcast regulation is. As Kilbourn points out in his Times op-ed, cable shows don't suffer from the same constraints. Like print, they're free to provide whatever interviews, information, and entertainment, they think will serve their audience, without government editors telling them what to include or omit. That's called freedom of speech and the press. It ought to apply to radio and over-the-air TV as well--with no Stern exceptions needed.