The Daily Stern: Weekend edition
: AMERICA UNDERGOES AN EFFECTOMY: It keeps getting more ridiculous every day:
At WTKK-FM (96.9), host Jay Severin is no longer allowed to use the term “effing.”
: FCC National Nanny Michael Powell has taken to saying that stations shouldn’t want the FCC to set the exact line:
WHERE’S THE EFFING LINE? “You do not want your government to write a red book of what you’re allowed to say and what you’re not allowed to say,” Powell said. Broadcasters “ultimately have responsibility for the product they produce. . . . There is an uproar now mostly because I think we’ve gone through a period when a lot of stuff was sort of left unattended. Broadcasters used to have a voluntary code that they used for themselves. That went away.”
But the problem with that, of course, is that no one knows where the line is and, as a result, everyone guesses it’s over there, no it’s over there. So now nothing is safe.
That is called a chill.
: FRIGHT: Michael Mayo in the Sun-Sentinental, published in a Stern-cleansed zone in Florida:
Thompson, a Coral Gables attorney, is the self-proclaimed and self-promoting crusader who wants to make America safe from whatever might offend his sensibilities and corrupt children’s delicate minds.
His brand of Puritanical intolerance scares me much more than the sophomoric, scatological and sexually explicit things Stern used to say over South Florida’s airwaves.